'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Inauguration Day, USA

Today, George W. Bush was (re-)inaugurated as US President, having won the election by 58 million votes to 55 million, last November.

I did not travel to Washington DC to join the celebrations.

Nor, however, did I go to join the protest demostrations that were held there. I was busy here, helping my friend with her new baby (still cute as a button!) and trying to catch up on numerous things.

In the afternoon I went, as usual on a Thursday, to join our weekly anti-war demonstration here in Charlottesville, Virginia. There have been times when I've been 50% of the entire demonstration-- or even, for up to 20 minutes at a time, 100%. But no matter. It's still important to do it.

Anyway, today, there were eight or nine of us. And the drivers passing our corner there were very feisty. In response to my "Honk for Peace" sign, I got a lot of prolonged honk-honk-honks there. But also, more yells or gestures of clear disapproval than I've ever had before. Let's say, maybe four or five disapprovers this week, as against certainly 200-300 honks or waves of support.

Later, I went to a special "inauguration day event" that the C'ville Center for Peace and Justice had organized...

It was a "read-in" of the entire US Constitution, plus all its amendments.

It was snowing by then, but we had around 25-plus people there in the upstairs meeting room at the town's central public library. I found the read-in unexpectedly moving. I gained a vivid sense of those 70 or so old guys, back then in 1787, wrestling among themselves with all those issues of how to craft the foundational document for an entirely new country.

Yes, they were all propertied white guys. Enslaved people were counted (at a rate of "three-fifths" of a free white person) for purposes of census-taking, and therefore for some purposes of allocating representation among the states. But they were certainly not allowed to vote. Native Americans who were not taxed-- i.e. most of them, since most of their landed property had already been stolen from them-- were not enfranchised. Women were not. Neither, back then, were unpropertied white men.

Gradually, over time, each of those groups was slowly given the vote, through a series of amendments to the Constitution. I got a strong sense of people crafting a document that they knew would need to be amended in the future; and quietly and systematically providing the basis for those amendments. (Or maybe it wasn't so quiet there?)

It was a fine and stirring way to spend an evening. We all took turns with the reading. We had people with great Texas accents; several kinds of Virginia accent; Yankee accents; a couple of British accents; a Palestinian accent. We had a young lad about ten years old and definitely some people in their seventies.

Before we did the reading the director of our regional library system made a few remarks about the infringement that the USA Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has made on the freedoms of the press and of expression, as spelled out in the 4th Amendment. He stayed to take part in the read-in.

I guess what I got from the whole evening was a strong reminder that being a US citizen is "about" something very different, and much more fundamental and long-lasting, than being a supporter of this or that political leader

The whole venture of US nation-building is one marked by numerous deep ethical flaws. But through it all, decent people have been trying-- however imperfectly-- to do the right thing. And there are plenty of Americans still trying to do that. Most of us, in fact. It's just that we don't agree on how to go forward; and the ossified, dysfunctional political-party system here certainly doesn't help us to think through the issues.