There is no country that is not here today
Make no mistake, we shall not see this again in our lifetime outside war.
By 7.00am there were already 200,000 people on the Washington Mall. That’s about the number that represents a decent turnout for any other inauguration. I have traversed from Union Station to Judiciary Square, out along 4th to D and E, to Pennsylvania Avenue and back, and I have never in my working life ever seen such crowds clogging every pathway, street and byway.
The faces are of every hue, the spirits irrepressibly high. I run into a woman from Hawaii with her black granny in a wheelchair and her white father pushing, he with a flowing grey beard and a bobble hat, they from Missouri. Three black women from Connecticut crammed on a tricycle rickshaw pedalled by a thirtysomething white woman from DC. Have the tables turned!? I meet them from Virginia. A lame Vietnam vet in his 80s from Florida, hobbling heroically without a stick on the grass beneath the capitol. The crowds are bunching. The police are trying to keep the flow with bullhorns blaring.
The air is brittle, blue, and pumped with human breath forming clouds above the bobbing heads. The sun is up. The fingernail moon by which I watched the early arrivals is gone. It is cold, cold, cold, and yet no-one seems to feel it.
From as far now as they can see, they are streaming from every corner of the world. Four African women with flaring golden turbans. “I am the Liberian ambassador to the United Nations,” stammers one between burst of “Obaaama! Obaaama! Obaaamaaa!”
Then an amazing clutch of people in one big, striding group – from Kashmir, from Israel, from Bolivia, from Sudan – urging hope upon their own people. They have come all this way, daring to believe that what happens here will infect life at home: peace in Darfur, in Gaza (see tonight’s Channel 4 News), in Bolivia. Our Bolivian so distressed by President Evo Morales’s failures. “He was our Obama… We need THIS Obama to be a real Obama and help us through,” she cries.
From Los Angeles, another wheelchair, the crowd taking turns to push a man in his 90s from Kansas… There is no town, no state, no country, it seems, that is not here.
Perhaps should Mandela ever die, the crowds will come again. But mark this: in our time, we shall never witness so big a global coming together. We are in the millions on the streets, even if they never reach a line of sight. The parade alone can only be glimpsed by 300,000. I think two million may prove an underestimate. But even if this ends in disappointment, they will indeed say, “Joy was it to be alive this day.”