Setting an example for young people - The Obama Inauguration

Washington, D.C. - It's impossible to ignore the sheer numbers of young people around town. Kids of all ages — from high chair to high school — have come to the nation’s capital to be witnesses to history. Not the history that the punditocracy are talking about in the closedoff, climate-controlled sets that keep them removed from the public they claim to speak for, but a different history.

These young people didn’t descend on D.C. to see this black man become our 44th president. They came to see this intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, extraordinary man swear the oath of office at a time that requires brains, guts, and heart like no other point in our nation’s past.

The more the talking heads analyze the significance of a brother becoming chief executive, the more young people will continue to tune them out (I watched the inaugural address from the MSNBC set on the national mall with Earnest, a 10-year-old black kid who didn’t know the assembled talking heads and couldn’t have cared less).

Young people don’t — and shouldn’t — think of his race as being a barrier to success, so they don’t believe Barack was elected in spite of his skin color. Besides, kids don’t love him because he’s our first black president, they love him because he’s the first smart, cool, nice president they’ve ever known.

And because they think he’s smart, cool, and nice, Generation O will grow up believing that being smart, working hard, sacrificing, and serving their community is also cool. So these are the first kids in a half-century to be challenged to make a difference by the example set by their president. After talking to a number of them this week, I firmly believe they will do just that.

When John F. Kennedy took the podium at his inauguration in 1961, he said, "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."

After that speech, a generation of young people looked to public service as a career choice. Unfortunately, too many of them spent too much time fighting with the other party and not enough time solving the country’s problems. Luckily, our 44th president is able to transcend the fundamentalist partisan politics that has crippled our government for so long and speak directly to the next generation; daring them to make the country and the world we share a better place.

So when he says, "What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship," he has a credibility born from the fact that he wasn’t around to pick a side in the petty fights of the past, and from the fact that he has proven himself to be an outstanding citizen.

And when he says, "Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations," young people will be inspired to meet the challenges he has laid out for them because he refused to let his own journey end, nor did he turn back or falter, until he was standing on our national mall addressing millions and millions of my fellow Americans as their president in a speech none of us will ever forget.

The day before the inauguration, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was honored. Someone said to me, "Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack ran so our kids can fly." As yesterday’s speech ended, I was hugging everyone around me, crying my eyes out, and thinking that for my new friend, Earnest, the sky is the limit.