I’m glad I watched the inauguration alone because I’m not sure I could have kept my composure around other people.

Watching today, I could not help but think of the many moments in my life that led to this day. I vividly recall the “Colored” and “Whites Only” signs in the Woolsworth’s stores of the old South. I personally saw race riots and demonstrations. The Voting Rights Act passed as I looked on. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech as I looked on. As a college freshman, I despaired as first Robert Kennedy and then MLK were shot down in 1968. This day seemed so far away in the future then.

President Obama’s race had little to do with my support for him starting in the fall of 2007. From my perspective, this day is for all Americans. We are a better country now than we were 40 years ago and that is such a short time in the life of an entire nation as large and powerful as ours. I celebrate the power of the very idea of this country.

In a way, it seemed to me the Inaugural Address was almost drowned out by the thousands upon thousands of silent words spoken to hearts, murmuring across the land unaided by microphone and never to be broadcast by television and radio. Ordinary people like you and me, saying to ourselves “wow”, saying to ourselves “I can’t believe it,” saying to ourselves “finally.” Not soaring rhetoric, but common things said by common people to the common heart of the nation.

Surely, men of state across the world will speak to this moment, some with good will and some with cynicism and resentment. I do not care about their words so much as I care about the words I am unlikely to ever hear: the murmurred words of millions across the globe spoken to themselves. America is the land of the free, sweet land of liberty.

Tomorrow the stock market will rise or fall and guns will fire in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israelis and Gazans will not fall into each others’ arms with love and compassion. People in America will struggle with home foreclosure, bankruptcy, divorce, child abuse, drugs and discrimination. This day does not end those things forever and ever amen. This day will not melt the heart of jihadists nor will it enlighten the small and power-hungry brutal elites of dictatorships.

Nevertheless, today I have much much more than hope. Today I have resolve bolstered by hope that if 40 years could march step by tortured step to the door of the White House, that my grandchildren will witness their own march of history to their own triumph of moral power over its generation’s enemies.

God has blessed America and now we must seek the works that define our faith in liberty and freedom.

Let Freedom Ring!

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