Today starts a new chapter in American government. With our 44th president ready to be sworn in and about half the country ready to run Bush out of the country (if it wasn't him it would have been some other guy. Really) I remember back when Reagan was inaugurated. I was in the first grade and the entire of my elementary school packed into my classroom to watch the one television we had in the school (we would have watched in the gymnasium but there were no outlets to plug it in so they piled in. most of us had no clue who the old man, who our parents said was a movie star, was at the time but he seemed nice enough and we watched the 19 inch screen obediently. It was still better than doing school stuff.
I hope that my daughter has the same experience in school today. She is about the same age I was, perhaps a little younger, and she will have no clue who the man on the screen is or what he ran on, or for but I hope that she will remember it in thirty years.
That being said, I hope that people know that the problems, and successes (yes, there were successes) were not due in whole but in part to everyone who has come before for the last 236 years. They will not be fixed or destroyed as quickly as the whim of one man. I wish him luck and don't envy his job but I hope he does the best he can and if he starts to go astray we have good people around him to get him back on the right path that our America was founded on.
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7 comments:
People have some pretty high expectations for the man, both here and abroad. I don't envy him or the job he has, but I hope for the future.
I think with the current batch of unreasonable expectations he is doomed to be a 1 term pres.
I agree that he has some very high expectations. I'm sure he won't attain all of them--who could? But we'll see about that second term. There may be enough people willing to give him more time to accomplish some of those goals. I hope does do a good job, and succeeds, because his success means success for our country.
Your daughter will remember, I think. This inauguration is like nostalgia happening in real time . . . if that makes sense.
Clinton did enough in his first term to get a second term--though he was never able to reform healthcare, one of his main platforms.
I think Barack has the intelligence and charisma to reach out to all parties and this will, eventually, lead to change.
the question on the table: is all change good? We will see in time.
Have been watching it on TV over here in Oz. I don't envy him the job ahead either, but hopefully he'll do some good.
I did my student teaching in 2004 in the first grade. We'd been having a lot of discussions about the election and who the president was and so forth. Well, one day when I was at a meeting instead of in the first grade classroom, one of my college teachers happened to be in the school for something else and dropped by to see me. He was all dressed up in a suit and tie, so when I got back to the classroom later, the first grade teacher told me all the kids had assumed he was the president. :) First graders are awesome.
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