Osler's Razor

There was much to remember in today’s inauguration, but the most lasting image may well be the attendance of America, so much of it, at the inauguration, that great mass of people stretching from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, around the Washington Monument and beyond the black mirrors of the Vietnam Memorial.

Change rides on the shoulders of crowds, for good and for bad. Evil can act through mobs, as in the lynch mobs that carried a man to death without trial or sentence. Sometimes, though, a loving throng lifts up a man for good, and this was one of those times. Over a million people stood on the mall in Washington today, in the cold, without a view of anything but the person in front of them, and held up Barack Obama as a new leader in trying times. A million people stood in unity there, just to be a part of it. For the first time, probably, a million people stood together and listened, even, to a poet they had never heard of.


There was a beautiful symmetry, too, in that enormous crowd. It was at the far end of the mall from the Capitol steps, in front of the Lincoln memorial, that Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed what then seemed like a huge crowd of 200,000 facing the other way on that same mall. On a sweltering August day, King said that “ In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Today, part of that check was finally cashed, having laid latent from August 28, 1963 until now. The promise of equality became much more real. A black man was inaugurated as President of the United States, with the potential to succeed or fail on his own merits. Certainly, the inauguration reflected a striking victory for Barack Obama and his political talents and ambitions, but I sensed in that crowd something more than just reflected glory. It seemed that who was really being inaugurated was that crowd, that flowing river of Americans from Lincoln’s feet to those of our lawmakers, a human chain tying together the stoic determination of Lincoln, the brave oratory of King, and the victory that was celebrated today. The only thing that could tie that all together, link the dreams to the fruition, was nothing less than the American people, and I’m not sure I have ever seen anything more beautiful.