Inauguration Day 2009

In an earlier entry in my other blog, ‘the opinionated traveler’ I wrote about the sacrifices one has to make for the sake of their success. In my own experiences in trying to follow this dream for the past 15 years, thus far mine range from the fact that I graduated from a big ten school, but have never been tailgating, the fact that I’ve never been to a concert (except for when I was bodyguarding the people performing), I’ve had to watch all of my sisters children grow up without really knowing me, and up until this point, I’ve seen most of my friends settle down, have kids and live ‘the American dream’ while I’ve always continued on a path that has no real room for compromise.

Of all the sacrifices I’ve had to make however, few have been as hard as having to be outside of the states for the inauguration of President Obama. (I was stuck in Korea working.) Granted, the work that I did paid for my tutilage under Shelley Mitchell (a former acting coach of Sean Penn who agreed to work with me), and that has already been a worthy investment. At the same time however, as I sat alone in a cold, unheated room in the middle of winter, listening to his speech while my father held the phone up to the TV, I had to lament at the fact that I wasn’t there.

There are few moments in my lifetime that have (or probably will have) such a monumentus resonance, and many of my fellow Americans (of all races and creeds) have commented that it was the first time in a very very long time that they felt both proud and excited to be an American. On Inauguration Day, my father, an African American in his 70s who lived through racism at it’s fullest, Raised an American flag outside of our home for the first time in his life… and did so with tears in his eyes. And that flag is still flying now. The next time I go home will be the first time in my life that I’ve ever seen an American flag raised outside of my home.

When I spoke with my sister on the phone as the inauguration was taking place her voice had an air of tranquility and a softness that I’d never heard her speak with before. For myself, it was these things, more so that anything, that made me realize just how powerful an event this was. Particularly since, it was not just blacks, but all of us, that put him there. Not black, white, Asian, Hispanic or Jewish Americans, but all of us together.

I don’t know what the future holds for us as Americans. As President Obama said, we certainly have hard times ahead, but I can say with certainty that he has given us something that we haven’t had in sometime: hope.

Hope that we don’t have to fight and that we can really all get along. Hope that the pain of history can be erased, and that we can let bygones be bygones. Hope that we can not just heal our own wounds, but each others.

There is always the chance that we will fail, but I, for one, and damn proud to stand by my neighbor, regardless of his or her color, and try my best.

Before I was born, my parents were divorced and not speaking to each other. But they came back together and with patience, communication, and understanding, they made it work the second time around. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here. To me, this is proof that fighting need never be permanent. I’ve read that almost anyone who undertakes the journey of great weight-loss fails the first two times they try, and that their success comes the third or fourth time around. To me, this is proof that we can still succeed at something, even if we fail the first few times.

At the beginning of the month, I heard a 10 year-old kid in Korea, yell out the phrase ‘We can change!’ I think he was referring to the slogan hailed by a lot of African Americans, ‘Yes, We can!’ Personally, I find truth in both of these phrases. And not just truth for African Americans, but truth for all of us.