Inaug

He emerges from obscurity (not that he has left it, but at least he has peeked out from within it) to provide some thoughts about the inauguration. Not even that many thoughts, maybe just a couple, but a couple that he nevertheless wants to express (and there's a little bit of that ol' poetic flourish that reminds him of the caliber of the poem recited yesterday which may or may not be related to some of the comments he's about to launch into).

First a very general thought - wow. Not wow for the 1 million + people there (and maybe I'm bad with the numbers), or for the particular content of the inauguration speech (although I thought it was close to perfect and with a great delivery), or for all the pomp and circumstance and tradition that swirls around the day (although I love all of it), but rather for the idea of what an inauguration of a new president means.

I think Feinstein mentioned it yesterday, but what got me most was watching the peaceful transition of power. We're talking about two relatively different men with relatively different views of the world and behind each of them, two parties with relatively different approaches. A little more than half the country votes for one party, and a little less than half of it votes for another. One side wins, and one side loses. Passions are high during the election. And then here we are a few months later and everyone's just watching the same thing and everyone feels a part of something greater.

I didn't vote for either party, I didn't really want to commit to either candidate, and yet I can still listen to the inauguration speech and feel good about my country and be optimistic about the future and sit in awe of how the system (as flawed as it is) still seems to work pretty darn well in certain ways. This place is young, but its as if we've created a mature relationship with each other rather quickly. We're comfortable with change and, sometimes, with being wrong. The relationship itself is what's important to us, not the individual pieces which each of us may agree or disagree with. I just think about how rare that is in the world, how many citizens of the world's various countries can claim the privilege of living in place where every four years they get to express their support for something they believe in. Fine, so the specifics of "change" are very hazy and some will question what can really change within this monster of a government that's very set in its ways. And others will wonder whether there's ever really any different between party stances and candidates. And we'll always have the fear of the "ignorant" masses who aren't informed and don't really know what they're doing. Yes, most people will vote based on "feel" and "emotion" and that's something we just have to come to terms with. But whatever the end result, we go on. We wake up the next morning and it's all still there and we try, at times with a lot of effort, to love all of it despite the flaws and the hypocrisies and the irrationalities. There's something about that which makes me proud even if it's all far from perfect.

Now that I got that little bit of "aww, shucks"ness out of the way, I move onto something I happened to pick up in Rick Warren's "speech." Forget for a second that I have a really hard time with a religious invocation during the inauguration for the president of a secular state. I don't really get it, I don't really feel comfortable with hearing someone talking about Jesus to the rest of the world, and I don't necessarily understand how this particular tradition has been around as long as it has. But if I do manage to push aside all of that, I was a little surprised to hear, in the first few seconds of Warren's prayer, what is perhaps one of the most important lines in Jewish prayer. Known as the "Sh'ma" (I spell it that way, deal with it), it's from the Hebrew bible which is also part of the Christian bible but it's still interesting when it's brought up by a non-Jew. The Sh'ma is a recognition of the oneness of God and is said during the most important (if not all) Jewish prayer portions. The text is - "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one." I happen to love this line a lot because it plays on a non-religious level for me as well - the pride I have about "being Jewish" and the love I have for the land of Israel. Of course I always interpreted the use of "Israel" in the prayer as more of a proclamation to the Jewish people as a people of one land and of one origin rather than a specific reference to Israel itself, but it likely encompasses both meanings. Either way, I only mention it now because I was a little surprised to hear the Sh'ma (in English) said at the inauguration. Maybe I just didn't expect to hear a prayer and there it was. Surely conspiracy theorists will probably like to grab onto this and claim further proof of the Zionist network that controls the world. But to me it was proof of a shared cultural heritage that we often fail to recognize. Here was a Christian pastor mentioning a line that people of different faiths read and absorb during their prayers. It's a line from a bible that, whether we like it or not, offered much inspiration to the founding of America, despite the secularist leanings of the Founders. It's something from the past that still reverberates and inspires today. Without dwelling on it any further, I thought it was pretty awesome.

The last point, and this is me being a little bit of a jerk but maybe sometimes I can't help it - the poem kind of sucked a lot. Check it out here. I mean, it reminds me of something I might have heard in a college writing class, like some disaffected emo kid who wants to express how alone we all are in the world and how we need to seek ways to come together. I don't know. I swear there are stylistic decisions she made which I see from my own poetry from like 10 years ago, and I'm only (almost) 27 so we're talking me at like the end of high school. I'm thinking maybe it's better not to have these poems because they're always going to sound sort of cheesy (maybe it's because they need to be "accessible" by all people) and after a good speech they're not really inspiring at all. There's also something about a poem that makes it silly when its read over a loudspeaker to thousands of people. I've always seen a poem as the sort of thing you read to yourself or recite in an intimate setting. Maybe that's a big part of what ruined it for me. Although, I gotta be honest, that even after rereading it I sort of rolled my eyes. I just don't think it was really what she felt or thought. It read as something artificial that she wrote because she had to. Maybe she could have done a better job of hiding that fact.