I've just arrived home from the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States of America. I spent a few days in our capital, Washington D.C., going to parties and talking to people about this important moment in history. Now that I'm home, I feel very different about the various events that I was fortunate enough to have been able to be a participant. While riding home on the bus, I overheard a young American student say to another passenger, "...It's like America is cool again...". That sentiment, scares me a bit. After analyzing this new precedent from the angles of race, class, civil rights, immigration, age, etc., I wonder if political pundits, cultural theorists, and other academics will ponder the question of why now, and how do people, white and black, American and foreign, really see this moment, experience it and re-tell it? Are we Americans just getting a "cooler" president, or are we getting this "new era" that I'm already hearing about on the news? Why can we ask a black president to do things and create changes in a way that we've never demanded from other leaders?
Vendors on the street yell at me "HOPE, 5 dolllars!". I shudder. Blacks and whites over 40 introduced themselves to one another and began civil conversations in public. I smile. Barack gives a speech that nearly moves me to tears. I beam. I read that her considers his white speech writer "his mind-reader". I cringe. There is something here that has me puzzled. I know that I have issues with race. I grew up in a small town in the south, there is no question about how my family's experience of sharing social spaces white people has been. So why can't I just accept that America is finally embracing a person of color for who they are, and not what they imagine them to be?
I have every confidence that Barack's presidency will outperform anyone alive has seen come before it, I just whether or not we're witnessing the seeds of our hopes being sown or the fruits of our labor being harvested.
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