414 days, 2 hours, 28 minutes since Bush is out of office!.
The Obama Inauguration...Dawn of a new day.
You are not living under a rock...(or you wouldn't be here on my site reading this.)...so I don't have to state the obvious fact that Barack Obama is being sworn in today as our nations 44th President.
It's not just that he is our nations first Black President that makes the occasion so momentous.
What is momentous is that our nation ELECTED our first black President.
It has OH so much more to say about us as a nation than it does about Barack Obama.
For the last 2 or 3 campaign cycles, my family has gotten involved with knocking on doors, making phone calls, manning computers, and producing media aimed at getting people to the polls and inspiring people into the corner of the candidate we supported.
Always, during every cycle, were the people who answered their door, or their phone with phrases like: "I'm just a working man"; "What does any of that have to do with me"; "There ain't no difference in any of em'"; "I don't have time to vote"; "Why should I care about who gets elected, they don't care about me"; ...and on and on. All perfectly shitty excuses for not voting...
...and yet their reasoning was simple and even understandable: They felt so alienated by the Political establishment that they had been lulled into passing up on excersising their right to take place in one of the greatest single human experiments in self-governence that the world has ever known.
Then along came Barack Obama. He invigorated the seemingly uninvigoratable. He brought hope, and not only the promise of a positive change, but the twinkle of a notion that he might actually be able to pull it off.
His candidacy alone indicated to millions of young black and minority youth, some with very non-Anglo-Saxon names, many in households headed by single mothers, that even they, if their cards were played correctly, and they worked hard, could attain greatness...
If his WIN on November 4th sealed those possibilities with firm resolve, then his inauguration today forges those possibilities into an impenetrable reality of cold-hard steel.
No matter what happens from this day forward...the game has changed, forever.
-The Dickens
