Inauguration Day

I’m glad we went to Washington: I would have made more than the eight hour round trip to be there for the seventeen minutes of Obama’s speech. It seemed as though the vast part of the crowd was African American, and those standing around us were openly crying, tears rolling down their cheeks whilst he spoke. Standing behind us were three girls who had travelled from Kenya to be there and who couldn’t contain their excitement, screaming with joy.

Of course, like many of Obama’s campaign speeches, it was a masterpiece, long on rhetoric, short on substance. It’ll take at least a year to have any firm idea if he can put his money where his mouth is, but judging by the crowd’s reaction, his supporters are willing to wait. The emotional elderly gentle man on the train on the way to DC put it best: “He’s not the Messiah and I worry that expectations are too high. He’s only a man. But I have faith.”