Dear Layla,
So, a week or so ago, your Aunt and I went to Washington to see something amazing happen. What made it even more exceptional to us is the fact that for you, in your life, it will always be simple history, just as “men walking on the moon” is a boring fact for your Dad and I but astonishing science fiction come true for your grandmother. Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009, and your Aunt Bo and I got to be there to see it happen, standing in the cold about 450 feet from the podium, in an astonishing crowd of 2 million amazed Americans.
We got this extreme pleasure because Erin worked her ass off on the Obama campaign here in Houston, organizing phone banks and canvassing squads, managing other volunteers, and generally making herself as indispensable to the local DNC and OFA staffers as she always is to me. This got us “Silver” class standing tickets, which put us in the outermost ticketed area — people behind us were ticketless, standing on the National Mall. (We found out later that we apparently were lucky to have the Silvers; some folks in the nicer, closer Blue and Purple sections were victims of crowd management gone bad, and never got in.) From where we stood, we could barely discern the podium, but we could see the Jumbotron quite clearly, and the PA system worked fine. We had no trouble hearing the speeches, the music, or Justice Roberts bollocksing up the oath.
Without these tickets, I’m not sure we would have tried to go — I hope we would have; being there is now one of my most treasured experiences, and rates on the list only a few slots behind the first time I held you. But we got the tickets, and Erin’s brother-in-law’s mom had room for us in Chevy Chase not far from the Bethesda metro stop, and we had the frequent flier miles to keep us from having to spend a fortune on plane tickets, so to DC we went. My boss was envious and supportive despite the crunch we were under at the time, and even texted me to cheer for him on Tuesday. (Of course, owing to the overloaded cell network, I didn’t get the text until well after the Inauguration was over. I’m confident our cheer volume was sufficient, though.)
The frequent flier mile tickets put us up there early, on Saturday, which was fine with Erin and I since we have friends in the District. We stayed with our friend Tony in Virginia that first night. His apartment was full of his kids’ artwork, and seeing all that gave me the same good feeling I always have when I see Tony and his kids. It’s neat to see who this guy from college grew up to be, which I’m sure is a feeling you’ll get someday. Anyway, we went out to dinner with Tony on Saturday, and then drove into the District to do some nighttime monument photography. It was super cold, and we froze our butts off wandering around from the Washington Monument all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial.
Something weird was going on when we arrived there; music was playing, and we could see shapes moving on the jumbotrons set up for Sunday’s Inaugural concert. We assumed it was a sound-and-systems-check of some kind — it was already about 9:00, and no one was out — but as we got closer we could recognize the singer. First, it was James Taylor, and we joked about “what kind of weirdo does a soundcheck with James Taylor,” but then it became an unknown voice singing “American Pie,” and we were close enough by then to be able to tell from the screens that it was someone actually performing. We just couldn’t tell who it was until we got a bit closer, when one of us said “Is that Garth Brooks singing American Pie which a choir?” Yes, yes it was. We figure it was a soundcheck or something — there was literally no crowd beyond those working the event — so it was kind of weird. Brooks, for his part, has been largely absent from American popular culture for at least 10 years now, so recognizing him (especially without his trademark hat) was sort of a challenge.
When we came back to the Mall on Sunday for the concert, it was with about 400,000 other people. The area around the Lincoln’s reflecting pool was a sea of people, all bundled up against the cold and forecast, but never actual, snow. A somewhat bizarre who’s-who of artists played that afternoon in honor of the new president-elect, from Bruce Springsteen to U2 to the 89-year-old folk icon Pete Seeger (and Brooks, natch, this time in his black hat). Actors read from significant speeches between musical numbers, and we all got a little taste of what Tuesday’s throngs would be like. It was here, on Sunday, that we first encountered the “friendliest massive throng of humanity EVER” phenomenon, as strangers willingly parted to reunite separated people, shoving was almost unheard of, and smiling epidemic. People danced and sang along, and listened intently when Obama spoke at the end of the afternoon. We were very, very cold when we made our way back to the Metro, but also excited and pleased and hopeful.
Monday was our less busy day; we were by this point working out of Virginia Ceasar’s home in Maryland, enjoying wonderful hospitality at a price you can’t beat (i.e., free). She was delightful to us, constantly ferrying us to the Metro at a moment’s notice, and for that Erin and I remain very grateful. We met up with the “Texans for Obama” crowd at a downtown brewpub for lunch, which turned out to be a delightful if insanely crowded affair. Erin’s crack squad of volunteers was there — including Paddy, a young man from Dublin who was so inspired by Obama that he took leave and flew to the US to volunteer on the campaign — along with the Texas-wide muckety-mucks and at least one surprise: an old friend of mine, long since moved to El Paso, had done a huge share of volunteering in West Texas since her husband worked for the DNC out there. It’s always fun to run into people in faraway places, but it was especially cool to add that kind of fun on top of the emotional high of Inauguration week.
Tuesday came quickly enough. The inauguration was set to begin at 11:30, as I recall, but we left Virginia’s before 8:00. She, of course, took us to the Metro station, fortunately on the same line as the Mall exit we planned to use to get to our section, Judiciary Square. The throng effect was already in place when we emerged just north of the Mall about half an hour later, and from that point on we pretty much stayed in a massive crowd until about 2:30 that afternoon.
There was some confusion about the proper walking route from north-of-the-Mall to the Silver entrance point on the south side, but eventually we did locate the path — which involved, hilariously, walking through an underground tunnel ordinarily closed to pedestrians. Walking, walking, and more walking ensued, until finally we found what we thought was the Silver entrance line. We followed it, and followed it, and followed it some more for about 45 minutes before we found what we thought was the end of it at about 9:45, our hearts sinking since the mile+ of line was not moving, and we were terribly afraid we’d be standing in line until well after the Inauguration was over.
In a gesture of absurd hope, I left Erin in the line and jogged about 20 yards over to a red-capped Inauguration volunteer to ask what was up. His answer saved our day: “yeah, the line’s broken and doesn’t lead anywhere. Just go back towards the entrance just west of the Indian museum, and you’ll get in there.” I yelled for Erin, and we ran for it, just ahead of a general announcement to the rest of the line. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
When we got the gate, we were cheek-by-jowl with hundreds if not thousands of other people all trying to move in roughly the same direction. (The upside of this was that it was the only time all day that both of us were warm.) Eventually, an opening happened, and we started to slowly “flow” into the Silver area, but we’d have been fine if we’d had to stay where we were: from there, at least, we could see the Capitol, and hear the PA.
We reached security soon enough. I assumed a full patdown was about to happen — I hadn’t even brought a pocketknife — but the crowds were such that they were just more or less waving people through to try to prevent a stampede, I guess. They never even checked our ticket, and by 10:30 we were standing at a fence separating us from 3rd street. A few minutes later we realized we could easily get much closer, and that’s when we relocated to our ultimate spot only a couple dozen yards back from the Capitol’s reflecting pool.
Looking back across the Mall, all the way back to the Washington Monument, there was an uninterrupted sea of people. Later, they said 2 million, but the Park Service — who control and maintain the Mall — no longer does official projections, so we’ll probably never know how many folks really were there. (It’s a fair bet that more will claim to have been there than actually were, too.) Where we were, we once again encountered the bizarre “friendly crowd” vibe so totally unusual for anyone used to big crowds — and when I say “big crowds,” I mean 50,000 or 100,000 at a major sporting event, not twenty times that for an event of global sociopolitical importance. No shoving. “Here, you dropped your glove.” “Need another handwarmer? I have extras.” “Let me take y’all’s picture.” And smiles, smiles, smiles. I got goosebumps as we stood, watching the former presidents — Carter, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and the incumbent — file in, and we all laughed and smiled some more when the cameras caught Obama’s daughters fidgeting and taking pictures of their own. Soon their dad stood, hand on the Lincoln bible, and took the Oath 42 other men took before him. (Quick quiz: why is the 44th president but only the 43rd man to take the oath?)
For your aunt and I, and for your parents, this election was more about getting our country back than anything else. Bush’s ruinous policies were hostile to growth, hostile to civil liberties, hostile to our national prestige, destructive to our alliances, and hateful to the principles on which our country was founded. Obama came from seemingly out of the blue in 2004 with a convention speech about fixing all that, and emerged quickly as a truly inspiring frontrunner even in the Democratic primaries two years later. The more he spoke, the more specifics of policy he proposed, and the more class he showed as a candidate, the more supporters he gained. He was the anti-Bush, but also a candidate of vision unlike any we’ve had in a generation or more. Clinton won twice, but he won by being better at the political game than the hangdog Republicans he ran against, and he was aided in both his elections by a freakshow third-party candidate that sapped support from the Right. Obama just plain WON, and in a way that reminded more than a few folks of RFK’s aborted campaign 40 years ago.
So there’s that, and this was emotional and incredible and hopeful, and it was this change that inspired many people, like me, to give money to a candidate for the first time, and to volunteer more time and effort than they’d ever given before. This was a huge opportunity, and one none of us wanted to blow.
But there was something else happening here, too, and it’s the thing I alluded to at the beginning of this letter. Barack Obama is an African-american. He may not be descended from American slaves, like his wife and children, but to the rednecks of our ancestral home that doesn’t matter, and by the time you’re old enough to read this you’ll know well the hateful terms those sorts of people would use for a man who looks like Obama. Bigots notwithstanding, America’s promise as laid forth in our Declaration of Independence does not stutter, and it does not equivocate: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
This has been a promise unkept for most of country’s history. For the first hundred years, we kept our collective fingers crossed, and whispered “um, except slaves,” and called it ok. For the next hundred, we said everyone was free, but instituted a shameful system of separation and substandard services for black Americans, a situation only partly remedied by the 60s and the civil rights era. People fought and died to make the Declaration true at Concord, yes, but also at Gettysburg, and also in quiet and not so quiet ways in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s. Evil men murdered peaceful idealists only a few years before I was born, and it took the intervention of the National Guard to integrate schools and ensure the Voting Rights Act wasn’t a sick joke. I grew up hearing “good” men, friends of your grandfather, tell racist jokes well into the 1970s. I have friends from college, born after the moon shot, who nevertheless have the memory of being called “nigger” to their face. It’s not dead, not yet anyway.
This is also all history for you. This also part of the litany of names and dates and places some terribly boring teacher has tried to cram into your head at some point. But let me tell you: no matter how amazing and moved and happy Erin and I were to watch Barack Obama take that oath last Tuesday at what your dad and I called “the end of an Error,” our happiness cannot compare to the collective joy of the African-Americans in that Inaugural crowd. An older black couple, about your Grandmother Green’s age, stood near us. If I’m right about their ages, the were born in the war, and remember Selma and lunch counters and colored-only water fountains and the absurdity of great jazz musicians playing in clubs where they couldn’t get served. But on Tuesday, the 20th of January, 2009, they watched as American moved from Jim Crow to Barack Obama in a single lifetime, a transition that a makes your great-great grandmother Anise’s stores of moving from horseback to 747 seem like a hop over a puddle.
This is why so many people went to Washington. The hope and the change and the promise after eight years of Bush, yes, but behind that a groundswell of amazement and pride and happiness about the way we were getting the change we needed. In 1938, Langston Hughes wrote “America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be!” In 2009, we got a lot closer to being what Hughes was talking about, to being who we said we’d be in 1776. We aren’t there yet. We’ll probably never get there; the ideals Jefferson set out are almost impossible, and assume our better Angels will always hold sway, but they are who we say we want to be. America is an aspirational state. But it’s that American optimism that makes me believe that by the time you’re old enough to read this, we’ll be even closer to that ideal than we are now, in January of 2009.
Love,
Uncle Chet
CC: Caroline, Natalie, and a nephew to be named later
