A 27-hour drive, four hours to walk two blocks and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with over 1 million other people filing through the National Mall in Washington D.C. This is the “mayhem” that Kathrine Warren, a senior news-editorial major, experienced when she got a chance to attend the 2009 presidential inauguration in the nation’s capitol Tuesday.
“We were shoulder to shoulder crunched in there between so many people,” Warren said. “There were a lot of barricades, so you would wait for 15 minutes and move two feet.”
Warren and her father drove all the way from Boulder to Maryland for the inauguration. In the inauguration madness, Warren said, it was actually cheaper to drive across the country than to buy two plane tickets.
Tuesday was a historic day as Barack Obama was sworn in as the first African-American president in the U.S. According to Warren, the same positive vibe was apparent throughout the capitol on Tuesday.
“Despite the fact that there were so many people, everyone was in a good mood,” Warren said. “There were 1.8 million people and no arrests.”
According to the Washington Post, however, officials prepared for the worst. Over 30,000 law enforcement officers and military personnel from across the country were employed to ensure that the inauguration went smoothly and safely.
Since the main goal for this year’s inauguration was safety and security, some problems occurred while trying to deal with the masses of people.
“There were people with tickets who weren’t let in,” Warren said.
An estimated 4,000 people with tickets to the swearing in ceremony were not let in. For those who did manage to get through security, however, it was an experience that will never be forgotten.
“I bawled my eyes out when they announced Barack Hussein Obama,” Warren said. “It was amazing. He didn’t use ‘I’ or ‘me’ in his speech. He used a lot of collective words like ‘us’ and ‘we’. I was impressed with how he did that.”
“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America,” Obama said to the crowd during his inaugural speech.
Obama seems to have set a ball rolling for change in America, Warren said. Warren said that in four years, especially as a soon-to-be college graduate, she hopes to see changes in the economy as well as improvements in funding for higher education. She seems to have hope, along with the rest of the country, that Obama will be the enabler of this change.
Warren documented her trip with a href=”http://kathrinepwarren.blogspot.com/” target=blank>blog.
“Overall, the inauguration was amazing,” she said. “Now I have a 30-hour drive back to finish all of the homework I missed while I was gone.”
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Sarah Ruebsamen at [email protected].
