A new day

I woke up this morning to a snow covered landscape; the kind where everything seems new and fresh and even the ugly is temporarily made beautiful. And so it is today, when Barack Obama, the first African-American president has just been inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; things on which we’d given up hope over the last eight years once again seem possible, things like diplomacy, respect for the rule of law, “humility and restraint”.

Snow on trees, Inauguration morning 1 20 09

I know that underneath the snow, underneath the shining hope of today, we still have economic morass to confront, military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, terror threats, the need to help negotiate some sort of peace in the Middle East and all the while we still have the same political chicanery in Congress.

But for today I watched with joy in my heart, along with millions of others. Even though I was alone in my house, thanks to technology I was able to watch and comment with friends in places like California, Vermont and Texas via the CNN/Facebook Live Feed. The Internet really does make it a small world after all. We reached across Cyberspace to joining hands and hearts, laughing, crying, cheering, sharing what was so wonderfully expressed by poet Elizabeth Alexander, that:

“In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.”