Posted on 01/21/2009 8:46:17 AM PST by LottieDah
The winter sun glinted off the flag pin on Barack Obama's lapel as he rose in the sudden hush and stepped forward to take the oath as our new President.
He fumbled over the words for a moment, but that made him seem only more human as hundreds of thousands in the Mall began waving as many American flags as have ever been waved in one place at one time.
The vast sea of flags kept waving as the cannons fired the 21-gun salute and the Marine band played "Hail to the Chief" for our most fully American President.
Back during the campaign, Obama was criticized for not wearing a flag lapel pin, and some seized on it to question his patriotism. He likely began wearing a pin as a political concession, but the flag became the truest symbol of his triumph as we proved that it really does belong to everybody.
The people who voted for him did not do so because of what he had on his lapel, but because of what he has in his heart. He is not just a son of Africa, but also a son of the heartland. He is at his very core not so much black or white as profoundly American.
Among those seated below the podium were 40 Medal of Honor recipients, including Peter Lemon, who at 19 had shown superhuman courage, fighting on and on as his comrades fell around him, as he himself was repeatedly wounded in Vietnam.
"This is the biggest thing that happened to me in my 58 years that's positive!" Lemon declared of the inauguration.
Also present was Gary Wetzel, who had fought even after losing his left arm. He had finally lost consciousness, but when he awoke, he crawled through fire to aid a fellow crew member on his downed helicopter.
"In the White House by President Johnson," he said when asked when he had received his medal.
Wetzel declared that we must all rally around his new President with much the same all-American spirit that he himself had shown that bloody day in Vietnam.
"He means business, and we've got to support him," Wetzel said. "We've got to pull together."
Next to the Medal of Honor recipients were the Tuskegee Airmen. Among them was Julius Freeman, now from Long Island, formerly of the 332nd Fighter Group.
"We had two Air Forces," Freeman said. "A black Air Force and a white Air Force, and now we're going to be one country."
"Today you become an American!" the woman beside him said.
Up at the podium, 30 rows from their place of honor, Obama invoked the noble example of our heroes past and present.
"We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service: a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves," Obama said. "It is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all."
He allowed that a President and all the powers of government can only do so much. The nation's great strength is in the people such as those who filled the Mall before him.
And, along with bravery, the flag they held stands for kindness and selflessness and determination and diligence and honesty and fairness and tolerance and curiosity and loyalty.
"These things are true," Obama said. "They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history."
He ended a speech that was not memorable and historic for any particular turn of phrase, but for its turn of heart, for the response of the magically diverse multitude. They cheered and again waved those flags and it seemed the most American of victories as he smiled from the podium.
When he stepped away, he embraced his children and his wife, and it was clear that with the First Family, it is family first. For him this is where being an American and being a President begins.
Then the Navy chorus led the gathering in the national anthem. The pin glinting on his lapel, our magnificently American new President sang along with his family and the Medal of Honor recipients and the Tuskegee Airmen and thousands who waved that star-spangled banner in a land so truly free and brave.
mdaly@nydailynews.com
Do you have the proper link for this?
Where’s the ‘barf alert’ on this puff piece?
Egads, why don’t they just put him on a donkey, let him ride through the streets of all our major cities, the crowds can wave palm leaves and scream ‘hosannah in the highest’, and just get it over with?
Sorry. Printing it a gazillion times won’t make it so.
www.nydailynews.com
I really should have added triple bag barf alert.
This is not a parody? And the person who wrote it doesn’t realize how ridiculous it sounds?
“now, truly we are one country.”
how stupid, senseless and childish.
IMHO
Where is the barf alert for this?
gotta be a JOKE, right?
Wow one country......kool. Does that mean me a typical white woman who is gun clinging and practices bitter religion. Or was that bitter religion clinging gun totting typical white person
Oh well doesn’t matter now! wooohooo
I think it calls for a horseshit alert.
Yeah. Right. Possibly foreign born himself, child of an American teenager and a foreign graduate student, and spent most of his childhood outside of the US and in a non-American environment. Real American, all right.
Oh good grief, it continues. Is Richardson some kind of expert on the circumstances of Obama’s birth (in your context, of course)? The Kenyan Ambassador has the credibility of a trained parrot. Please ... if you insist on clinging to the Kenyan thing, at least provide some actual, real, credible, admissible-in-court sort of proof or give it up on every thread.
To the embarrassing puke who wrote this tripe...uh....no you fool, we are not one.
Ein volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuhrer!
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