The Inaugural at Bay Street, and Main Street USA

By T.J. Clemente

Posted 1/21/09

It was one of those moments of a lifetime. While millions lined the mall in our nation's capital, hundreds were filling up every seat at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. As the live footage played, one man waved an American flag on a wooden pole, another waved a shoe when GW was shown. Crowds in the theater and in meeting places all around the country cheered and hissed - depending on the face shown on the Jumbotrons set up all over America. It was as though the Woodstock Nation, the Vietnam War protestors, the Million Man March on Washington, Earth Day and Farm Aid crowds had finally gotten their man elected. And Barack Obama did not fail a single soul; he took the moment and marched into American mythology before the adoring hordes.

Right from the start, as the small-town crowd in Sag Harbor started to fill the seats at Bay Street, there was an electric enthusiasm. Neighbors waved to neighbors and strangers talked to strangers as though they were friends. The sea change was happening before their eyes, the dark was becoming a new dawn, and the clumsy negative ways of the past gave forth to a regal smoothness that uplifted every spirit. There were cut-to's on the screen of elderly African-American men and women with tears in their eyes, and 20-somethings of all ethnicities standing tall, knowing they had made a difference. There was no doubt anywhere in the world that real change had come to America.

The ceremony was the closest thing the United States has to a coronation of a king. But it was more, it was in fact perhaps the exclamation point of a proclamation that all men are created equal and opportunity can propel anyone forward based on merit and ability. President Barack Obama is now Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton; but also Tyler, Van Buren, Johnson, Nixon, Hoover and Grant. He is capable now of great things and terrible blunders because he has been given the trust of the American populace to lead this nation where his vision believes it should go.

With an Inaugural Address that was delivered like a proclamation from God, the new President displayed oration skills that are second to none in America today. The march he feels he must lead the nation on is in his mind equal to the charges at Gettysburg and the Normandy invasion, all in one. With confidence and credibility corrupted to its core in so many sectors of out nation's fabric, President Obama stands ready to lift the total being of the whole nation into a charge forward to forever greatness.

Who does not wish him well? Who does not believe all must be done to get a great country back in perfect step with itself and the world. Everything that is, which was not created by nature itself, was once but a thought in a mind. On this Inaugural Day the country was one heartbeat, one conviction of purpose, one united front to face the huge obstacles created by events of the immediate and dark part of our history that attempted to halt the dream of prosperity, peace and happiness.

Aretha Franklin sang, a quartet of brilliant musicians of multiple ethnicities performed, a poet read and the band played on. But most profound was the visual image of real change that has come to America in the form of President Barack Obama. This inauguration day will forever be the moment signifying that chains of the past, both literal and figurative, will no longer be able to hold back a nation and its future.