Repudiating Bush, celebrating the historical meaning of Obama's inauguration

Like everyone else, I imagine, I have a story about how I watched Barack Obama's swearing in. I don't share this because I feel like my story has more meaning than yours, or even any great significance beyond the emotional resonance the experience carried for me. I share it in the hope that we will find, at some point, through an accumulation of these accounts, a kind of oral history of the moment and its significance across the wide landscape of the nation.

I watched Obama's swearing in sitting on the floor of the gym of my son's school. He goes to a Jewish dayschool on the southside of Chicago. And his teachers - the entire administrative and instructional staff of this school - made the decision that he, and his classroom full of 3-year-olds and all the other kids in the school, should watch the inaugural ceremony. And the remarkable thing was how clearly he and his 3-year-old classmates understood that this was important. They all seemed to know who Barack Obama was. This election has been going on so long, and our household has been supportive of Obama throughout, so my son has been surrounded by cheerleading for Obama for most of his life. Shortly after he learned to talk, he learned to say Barack Obama. He could recognize his picture on TV, or on a book's dust jacket, early on. I imagine this was true for many of the other kids in his class. My son's school is a remarkable place. The preschool and kindergarten programs are recognized for their excellence - the teachers are creative and compassionate and engaged - and my son's class is diverse: African-American kids, Japanese and Korean kids, Latino kids, and, in many, many cases, kids from mixed families, where mommy is from one race or ethnicity or religion, and daddy is from another. In some cases, the kids in the school have two mommies, in a few cases they may have two daddies.

I got there to pick up my son, at the normal time I would, shortly before Obama took the oath of office, and I sat down cross-legged on the floor behind my son, and he scooted back and sat on my lap. Sitting there, among kids and parents from all backgrounds, in a school my wife went to, where my son now goes, in the neighborhood where Obama lived and taught, a neighborhood that sits surrounded by poverty, but gathers together people from all over the world, I wept. Not openly. I was embarrassed to weep too openly. Which was stupid, because others in the room were weeping.

Obama's speech acknowledged the need to celebrate the milestone we were witnessing and served as a repudiation of eight years of Bush folly and failure. Obama promised that we would restore our commitment to science, and end the Bush administration's efforts to discredit science, and ignore scientific consensuses that were at odds with the interests of their allies in industry and the beliefs of those in the evangelical community. He promised to end governmental, tax, and regulatory policies that favored "only the prosperous" and served to protect and supplement the wealth of the wealthiest. He promised openness where the Bush administration favored secrecy. He rejected the idea that our liberties and our privacy and our constitution could be pushed aside in the interest of security. He embraced diplomacy and negotiation and multilateralism and rejected Bush's preference for unilateralism and preemption and saber-rattling. He celebrated America's diversity, markedly different from the Republican party's efforts to portray immigrants as unwelcome guests, Muslims as untrustworthy, gays as sinners. It was a tough speech, beginning with a polite acknowledgement of Bush's "service" to the nation, but then going about the business of identifying the variety of ways Bush failed America.

There's a line in Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail where he says: "Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds." I've always marvelled at the ambition and the sweep of that statement. If you accept it, it means that everyone - even those we haven't yet fully embraced, like illegal immigrants, gays, felons - should expect to be protected fully by all of our laws. No one should be jailed without due process, everyone should be allowed to marry, each of us should be able to vote. Obama's inauguration, a day after the celebration of Martin Luther King Day, and unfolding on the same mall that hosted King's 1963 I Have a Dream speech, inevitably draws our attention back to the work of the generation that fought for and achieved civil rights for African Americans. Sitting there in my son's school, I felt like we had gone a long way toward the day when all of America's children, black and white, Jews and Gentiles, could sit down together. King's words didn't map out the full diversity of today's America, but every journey begins with initial steps. One of the other great achievements of my lifetime was the conquest of the moon. Perhaps the famous words spoken then make sense here too. This is a giant leap.