Inauguration Day
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
Tides swept across the crowd at the National Mall, rolling on the swaying arms and waving signs from the Capitol Dome to the Washington monument. An estimated one million people came to see Barack Obama be sworn in as 44th President of the United States and to hear the words that he would impart at a pivotal turning point in our nation. His speech was expected to define the challenges facing Americans and begin to lift a nation that has lost its way. They gathered in Washington en masse for days prior to the official ceremony waiting to hear the words – words from the nation’s first African-American President delivered in his trademark, prolific fashion – but words, all the same.
So, on the afternoon that America takes its first real steps toward transformation, and after I watched Obama stand before the world on a historic occasion and offer up phrases that might one day be etched in stone, I retreated to the public library to find more inspiration in other beautiful words that have already lasted the ages. And in the narrow book stacks I found the very Americans Barack Obama will need to revitalize this country.
Distractions from a two-year old boy named Hunter eventually led me to notice the people, a large number for a Tuesday afternoon, and not the usual library crowd. Hunter’s parents called after him across the study area. He hadn’t been taught library rules. He communicated in whoops and hollers to get his parent’s attention, and then used something like sweet talk in speaking to himself in a fashion loud enough for everybody to hear. When he was finally silent, he wove his way around the table legs. His parents called angrily again, “Hunter!”, but did nothing. Hunter and his close-cropped blonde hair would be cold when they finally walked him outside into the January snow, and the book shelves were finally silent. He made noise all the way through the library – sharp screeches dissipating until he walked out the foyer and finally to the exit.
I had my back turned to the fiction racks. An older woman walked with as purse under arm through rows with large print, science fiction, mystery and straight fiction books were, straightening her glasses, inspecting spines but not kneeling or pulling anything down from top shelves. She was there for leisure reading, but she wasn’t the only one without serious intent. Some men in baseball caps sat at computer terminals – one was with his wife and they played video slot machine games (even computers are infiltrating libraries and threatening to be a more engaging sources of entertainment).
Libraries are no longer safe havens from more popular past times. The movie and music shelves are as diverse and expansive as the book collection. I looked around and didn’t see anyone reading, and it was then that I realized that nearly everyone was conducting serious research. The cubicles along the walls were filled with blue collar workers searching for work. The men were surprisingly hard-edged, more like mechanics than scholars, chains dangling from back pockets, worn blue jeans, taking care with books down about car repair. The ladies were older, not yet at retirement age, and I felt a sorrow for them that they would be here using the Internet to conduct job searches rather than reading whatever they liked while living on retirement accounts – but then I figured they would be reading the wrong things.
These people are the America that Obama needs – the men and women who will do the smaller things in our country to bring about the hope he speaks of. Hope is a word he championed in his reelection and that he nearly made his own. Americans from the middle state outward to the coasts, heard him say in town hall meetings and factory tours that hope needs to be restored beginning in the White House and through to America’s most common workers. Hope has now become a commodity that America expects him to deliver despite it subjectivity. Hope can not be packaged. Hope can only be pointed to and more often than not it promises to happen in the smallest ways, with American families and corporations making the decision to dissolve what Obama has called the “me first” mentality. These typical Midwesterners in the library, like myself, have benefited and been defeated by that perspective.
Above the library’s din, a train whistle from the after-lunch cargo train sounds as it approaches the downtown intersection. Sweet is how it sounds, higher than the coughs and clearing throats, footsteps and pant legs rubbing together, polite laughter in office conversations, and keyboard clicks from the terminals along the wall. I may leave this place to watch the trains. The weather is below freezing and the snow is being spit, but at least there is motion and the rules are different. Passing trains are allowed to loud, there are no rules for them in regard to volume. The whistle sounds loud as it passes by the lowered crossing arms. Hunter, if he were to stand at the intersection and scream, would be drowned out by the velocity and noise. In Washington, he’d be free to shout as loud as he wanted for his new president. But not in the library – there should be strict rules there, and more hope. I walked out with D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love under my arm.
