Belated Inauguration Day Thoughts

I was very heavily invested in this year's Presidential election. It played out over the course of my maternity leave, and I voraciously read and watched anything and everything about the election, the candidates, everything. In our state, early voting is encouraged, and by mid-October, my vote was already cast for Barack Obama. On Election Night (well, the next morning, really) I cried when I learned that my candidate had won. As I told my mother -in-law, I am proud that our kids will grow up in a country where having a black president would be "no big deal", because the first president they would truly remember is BO. They will never really understand how big a deal this is for so many Americans, and I think that is wonderful.

Having said that, you could not get me to DC with a 10 foot pole! Hearing about the millions of people descending on the already packed city makes me shiver inside. People in our area chartered buses to go down and celebrate this historic occasion, and I know they're not alone. I wish them well, and hope that they find a decently priced room and a reasonably priced meal, and are not stuck on their bus eating unmicrowaved wheat germ pitas (they are Vermonters, after all).

Like the Superbowl and New Year's Eve in Times Square, the Inauguration is an event best experienced at a distance, preferably in the comfort of your own home. You can see better, you can hear better, and the only person yapping your ear off and squishing you is your 3 year old.

How did I spend this historic day? At work, along with a large majority of Americans. My husband's company had viewing rooms set up for employees to watch, and doughnuts to celebrate the historic event. My company took the pretty impressive step of removing the ban on streaming video placed on all work computers, and allowing employees to watch the inauguration on CNN.com.

Unfortunately, millions of Americans were watching on CNN.com, and the CNN Live Feed was not functioning well with the heavy demand. My coworker and I saw "I, Barack Hussein Obama" , and then the frozen image of BO, right hand raised, huge grin on his face, frozen like a screen saver for the next 10 minutes. In some ways, that says it all.

With today's technology and news cycles, not only will we be able to watch the highlights later on, we can watch them until we're absolutely sick to death of them. Maybe it will be a good thing for me to watch until I'm sick to death, because then, like my kids, I will get over the fact of this momentous, historic occasion, and it will become no big deal that today our world has changed for the better.