The Day After

We became tourists again on Wednesday, the Day After the big event. We weren't due to head back to Sandpoint till Thursday. So while most of the huge crowds that had traveled to DC for the inauguration were returning home (in what were now hugely crowded airports; news reports said bottlenecks at check-in caused many to miss their flights and face hours of delays) we slept in but managed to get back down to the capital before noon. We visited Congressman Minnick’s office to get passes to the House of Representatives gallery; we were lucky enough to catch the congressman in his office and thank him again for providing those purple tickets to get into the inauguration. That’s Walt above, with Chris, Nate, Sandy and Autry.

In the House we watched as a handful of congressmen debated a series of amendments to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP; that’s the massive $700 billion bailout bill for the financial markets, of which the second half has still to be approved. The congressmen were mainly arguing about how to impose more accountability on the recipients of the federal largess.

Afterwards we out into another sunny but cold day and cruised by the spots on the mall we had made it to the previous day. The second photo above is the intersection of First and Louisiana outside the purple gate, at roughly the same spot where we had been squeezed in the mass of people the day before. It was hard to envision that huge crowd. Click to compare that photo.

We walked by the Newseum, where they displayed a score of the morning’s newspaper front pages from around the country, comparing how they covered the inauguration. We visited the Smithsonian’s art and natural history museums and caught a meal.

Most outstanding, though, on this Day After were the conversations with the others who had experienced the inauguration, reliving the events and perspectives. We talked to several others who had held those prized tickets but never made it in due to the crowds; one of those included a staffer in Minnick’s office. The Washington Post report on the problem estimated 4,000 ticket holders were turned back but that estimate is low. Reviewing my photos and other photos, there were 3000-4000 at our gate alone; blue and silver areas had problems as well. We heard that the son of our Bonners Ferry friend Ed Katz got stopped and trapped in one of the tunnels leading to our purple gate; there’s already a Facebook page with posts from more than 1500 posters for the Purple Tunnel of Doom. The best overview I've found is a Huffington Post reconstruction of what went wrong.

More often, though, the conversations with the others there were about the power of the event and the feelings it brought out.

Finally after dark, for the last hurrah of our trip, we visited what is surely the most moving monument on the mall, the Lincoln Memorial. Even after 7 p.m. in freezing temperatures, there were a few hundred people there – doing as we were, connecting the dots from the legacy of our greatest president to this new president.

As one fellow at the inauguration said, looking at that sea of humanity stretching down the mall, “Everyone here has their own story.” All those people brought their stories together to witness the turning point that Obama's swearing in represented. Everyone had a different reason to be there and feel affected by the event depending on their story. But I'm pretty sure one thing almost all of those 1 million or 2 million people felt was a shared joy. And as Sandy said, that's maybe the biggest thing we brought away from being witness to the history: The sensations of being in an immense crowd of joyful people. We were just droplets, in a sea of happy people.

Here’s a remarkable fact: The official crowd estimated (derived from a density analysis of a satellite photo, but it's just a guess) puts the crowd at 1.8 million. Yet the police and secret service made not a single arrest that day, despite extremely stressful conditions in some areas. There were no serious injuries and no one died. It seems statistically impossible that 1.8 million people could gather without an arrest, a bad injury, an accidental death.

Or maybe, it speaks to what good will and common optimism can produce. Maybe it can make some impossible things possible. Maybe this new president really can help us turn a new page, to pull together, to recognize our differences but set them aside to find solutions to our common and pressing problems. That's the hope I have.