If today doesn’t move you, you must be made of stone

I had a somewhat surreal experience this week.

I was helping my best friend from college craft what he would say during live network inauguration coverage when Barack Obama officially became President after taking the oath of office.

I had to chuckle because I wasn’t actually covering the inauguration.  After 12 years in the news business, I was reduced to ghostwriting a script for someone else.  But life is funny like that sometimes, and I gladly deferred to my more talented and successful friend.

As we kicked ideas back and forth, we tried to find words that would be appropriate but not melodramatic… something that put the moment in context and perspective, without being contrived.

That’s not as easy as it sounds.

While we hashed over an “and” here, and a “but” there, it finally sank in for me: a black man was about to become the leader of the free world.

No matter what political philosophy to which you subscribe, that’s an incredible thought.

And it’s one that most could not have imagined just five or ten years ago.

Forty years ago, it was just plain impossible.

Every day in this job, I drive past monuments and statues honoring some incredible people, and depicting some horrible moments in this city’s and this nation’s history.

They’re there so we never forget our past, and always remember who helped get us to our present.

I recently started teaching a class at UAB and ended up watching Barack Obama’s inauguration and inaugural address in my classroom with a couple of students.

On my way home, I drove past some of those monuments and called my mother. 

She’s always up for a spectacle and was clearly moved by what she was watching.  My mother grew up in the North, and so the Civil Rights Movement is likely something she saw on her television screen and read about in the newspaper, and yet, the moment wasn’t lost on her.

“This is just such a great thing,” she said, choking up for a moment.

I told her how happy I was for the people memorialized in marble and stone, and for the people who fought alongside them.

The statues make it seem like the fire hoses and police dogs and beatings and bombings were centuries ago.  They were not.  They took place a little more than 40 years ago. 

Today, the efforts of those brave people reached a high point.  As anyone will remind you though, there’s still a long way to go.

I’ve been disappointed, but not surprised, by some of the derogatory comments I’ve heard in Birmingham today.  God knows if there was one day where we could all stand back and enjoy the historical significance of this moment, today would be that day.

But I guess more than a decade of extremely bitter, partisan rule has turned some people into nasty cynics.

Let them be cynical.

I think what brought millions of people—black, white, Asian, Christian, Muslim, and Jew—to Washington today was the sense that this biracial President, the son of an African father and white mother from Kansas, will somehow find a way to bring us all together to form a “more perfect union”.

He captures our hopes and dreams, because we all see a little bit of our stories in his.

The partisan political battles begin anew on Wednesday.

I, for one, am glad I lived to see this day.

Later on, I’ll talk to my friend to see what he actually managed to say when the new President finished taking his oath of office, just past noon today.

My suggestion went something like this:

“It was a little more than 45 years ago… at the opposite end of this great mall… that a preacher named Martin Luther King, Junior, told the world about a dream he had.  Today, part of that dream has come true.”