We Are ONE....Freezing in the Cold

The alarm did not go off, and so when we awoke we were off like organized chaos. Breakfast half eaten and our stuff half packed as a flurry of limbs walked the cold three to four miles to the nearest train station.
So when we arrived to discover that the train we needed did not run, and received our tickets for another train, only to be deterred in this as well, I had become quite agitated. In the end we ended back up at the hotel and left with both cousin and his friend, who had extra sleep and much more rested than we.

Now, for the biggie! Yes, the concert, featuring tons of artists to come speak and sing for the Inaugural to come. We had to walk for over 2 hours, to finally succumb to our exhaustion with pushing through the crowd and being situated with not over several hundred thousand as the media had stated, but over a million people.

This was definitely a time to remember, as the quick two hour production had various speakers talk about Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr; Rosa Parks and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The speeches were captivating, and left us breathless and cheerful despite the cold. The theme throughout all of the speeches was the idea that "we are one." One united people, one collective group, one America. It was a lot like Christmas in this sense, where everyone smiled and was rather polite to one another, knowing that we were all down there for the same reason.

However, there always has to be a dark cloud shining in the brightest of days, and this for the particular event (besides not getting a hug from Obama), was due to the random people around the area protesting against him. A group of people of a variety of races held papers and magazines out that they had written, screaming things such as, "We now have a black man on the seat of white power."

In the end, we just had to laugh as everyone pushed by, not wanting to hear it because we had all come there for Obama. More people than imaginable had shown up today, and I found myself engaged in conversation with people who had traveled from Russia and France in order to see Obama.

If this means anything at all, then it represents the faith we have in this man, and the belief that with his help he can begin to guide us out of the issues we face today. Years and years it will take, but we can do it. But not only does America have faith in him but other countries as well. We stand not only as one America, but one united world, and for once, it looks like change is going to come.