Inauguration, finally
Feb. 2nd, 2009 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aidenfirethis post is much delayed, but I've been plugging out bits and pieces of it since the 20th, pretty much.
So yeah. The Inauguration. I was there! And so were a lot of other people. like. A lot. More people than I'd ever seen before in my life. More people than I knew existed. EVERYWHERE. PEOPLE EVERYWHERE.
My school hired a couple buses, and through the sponsoring of a few different groups on campus (Black Student's Union, Women's Caucus, College Dems), bus tickets were only $15, from NY to DC. The bus took us to a metro station in Maryland, we were handed a map, and told to be back to Maryland by 6pm that evening. This was at aprox 3:30am, by the way. We'd gotten on the bus at 8pm the night before.
This is how many people were at the furthest station from DC at 4am.
We arrived in DC, got on the right train and everything (score!), and were on the mall by about 4:30, 4:40. We were walking up the mall, when I noticed a few people start trickling in off the side...and then more people, and then a flood. From comparing notes with friends at other places afterwards, we figured out that they'd opened a second, closer gate where people had been lined up for over an hour at least. I was like, "Oh hell no! We're not letting all those people in front of us!" So I grabbed my friends and we booked it, flat out sprinted for probably five or six blocks of mall. We worked our way up super close to the front. We were packed in pretty tight, but not uncomfortably so at this point. We didn't realize at the time, because you can't really see anything when people are packed that closely, but we were 10-15 people deep from as close to the front as you could get without a ticket.
Observe:
The fence you can kind of see there was as far forward as any of us peons were getting.
Even for this early (It's just after 5am now), the air is electric. There are people singing and chanting and just cheering sporadically for the sheer joy of it. It's cold, but not too bad--maybe 25F. In Rochester, it had been hovering around 0F, so it felt downright comfortable for the first hour or so, especially with all the other people packed around.
Observe the 5am crowd:
We were standing in front of these awesome sassy ladies and just getting to know the people around us. When you're standing with these people for hours, you just start talking. They were from like Ohio or something and just giddy with excitement. The crowd keeps getting more compact and we're being pushed closer and closer together.
About 6am, this guy starts pushing his way through the crowd, muttering something about his mom being just up ahead. By the time he gets to us, it's too dense to even push his way through rudely. There is simply not anywhere else to move to. He's kinda tool-looking, about my age, around 20, white kid from a preppy college. He's with a friend. This friend staggers past me, leans on my shoulder, and elbows me in the boob. I was not ok with this. He also smells strongly of alchohol. Tool-Box is pretty drunk, and his friend Drunky-Pants is schwasted. He can't even stand up. I didn't realize at first because there wasn't enough room for him to walk in a straight line anyway. And then Drunky-pants starts doing that drunk leave over and plant your feet like you're going to vomit thing, and I have never seen a crowd move faster. Suddenly there's like a three foot diameter circle of space around them, which is absolutely luxurious.
People start shouting and yelling, "Get him out of here, get out, what are you doing, he's gonna puke, get him out!" At one point the crowd is actually chanting "Get Him Out!" Tool Bag is all...oh sorry, there's no where to go, sorry, I can't move, which, was bullshit because 1) he just pulled him through crowds and crowds of people so he could have gone back the way he came, and 2) as we just learned, nothing moves a crowd faster than someone who looks like he's gonna puke.
Then Tool Bag starts getting an attitude and yelling like, "I volunteered for Obama for FOUR WEEKS!" like that gave him some sort of a vomit quota or something. AND THEN he was like, "It's because we're white, isn't it?" Which...no, it was because they were drunk as shit. And yeah, we were in an area of mostly black people, but my friends and I, all white, were literally on the front lines, like a foot away from his face.
So finally I reach out, grab his arm gently, and wait until he looks at me. I'm like, "You have to leave. You won't be able to move forward. Go sideways. People will move." He looks at me, grumbles, and then...does what I told him!! The entire crowd cheers me, and the sassy black ladies are all, "ye-ahh! That's our girl! MMMHMM!"
So that was a joyful moment. It was also around this time that we noticed SNIPERS EVERYWHERE. My pictures of them didn't really show up, but, you can kinda see the dots on top of the building here:
As all this is going on, we're getting closer and closer together. Observe:
That wasn't for the picture, that was just how close together we were standing. My range of movement was literally only my head. There were volunteers handing out those little flags, and we were standing so close to people that I didn't even need to hold it up with my hand. I could just let it go and it wouldn't move because there wasn't even an inch of space for it to fall through. It was the work of like five minutes to even get my camera out of my pocket to my face to take this picture. At one point, I got separated from my group. Only by like two people, but that was two people more than I could push my way through. I ended up dropping to the ground and crawling in between people's legs, because it was absolutely the only way I could move forward.
The sun is coming up, and more and more people are coming:
Also with all of this closer and closer together, we're also getting pushed closer and closer to the front. By 8am or so, we are this close:
Again, that fence was as close as any of the unwashed masses were allowed to be. I know I keep repeating we were SO CLOSED and we were SO CRAMPED over and over, but really, we were! For reference, this is the number of people behind us
that's as far as I could see. There were people after and after and after that. An UNENDING MASS OF PEOPLE.
Eventually we can't even handle the crush anymore. like. omg. So we move back a little, just to have enough room to breathe. We're still super close:
but there is a little room to move about. We are also at this point, freezing. We'd been standing outside, in January, without moving, for hours and hours. We were losing feeling in our feet. My feet were at that stage where they've been cold for so long that they're starting to feel warm again, just because they're going numb. It was like something out of wilderness training. We couldn't really sit down because we were afraid of getting trampled, but one of us at a time would sit, and try to rub feeling back into their feet. I was starting to worry, with no hyperbole, that I was going to lose toes. So I grabbed dirty newspaper and subway maps off the ground, took my shoes off, wrapped my feet in the dirty paper that hundred of thousands of people had walked across, and put my shoes back on. It helped a little, but not enough. We had to do something. In retrospect, I hate that we had to leave, after having defended our prime spots for hours, but we were past the point of caring at this point.
We went to a vendor, pooled our money, and bought all the hand warmers we could afford. Again, they helped some, but not enough. However, it was tolerable now.
It's about 11am at this time, and things are starting to happen. Speakers giving talks, senators arriving, etc. There was also a small lol moment where they didn't quite turn off the mics in between actually talking, so we were hearing all this random small talk. My favorite excerpt was some guy who was like, "How's your mom? I love your mom!"
Around 11:30 I think, the past presidents start coming in. The Clintons stood out as being kind of creepy--neither of them were smiling at all, and Bill was holding Hilary's wrist rather than her hand. I have pictures of the screens we saw this on, and can show you if you'd like, but nothing of the people themselves.
Another funny moment--W. came out, and shook some lady's hand as he was walking to his seat. She immediately afterwards wiped her hand off on her skirt. Bush cooties! lol.
The crowd by this point is just going nuts:
The excitment and energy in the air is palpable. Everyone is just enraptured. Whenever someone remotely well known comes out, 2M people just cheer. It's such a rush! I kept hitting this large black man in the head with my energetic flag waving, hahah, and each time I apologized and finally he was like, "baby, everything is nothing today." There was that mood every where--that everything we were suffering through didn't even matter, because the power of this day and this moment and this movement transcended everything.
When Obama was sworn in, and was giving his address, it was the most amazing thing. Just think for a minute--have you ever heard 2M people being silent? It felt like a holy moment, like the whole world was holding their breath to see if this was really happening.
It was absolutely unforgettable.
However, all good things must come to an end, and eventually we all had to try to get out of the city. Because of the parade afterwards, half the streets were blocked off, and no one knew which one. It was a straight up clusterfuck. None of the cops or security knew a thing. The most helpful advice we got was, "Well, walk down that street for a while and maybe eventually you'll find an open metro station." You couldn't see anything, because there'd be a couple hundred thousand people in front of you, so you'd fight your way all the way down the block...and realize that the street was barricaded off for the parade, and that you had to fight your way back upstream, and that you were back where you'd started. It took us maybe 20 minutes to get from the metro to our final place in the morning. In the afternoon, from farther back, it took us about 3.5 hours. And this was after we were freezing and exhausted and had been standing in the cold for more than eight hours straight, without a break.
This is the first metro station we tried to go to:
Obviously that was not happening, so we continued on. and on, and on. This is the one we eventually go to:
This is the people who are still behind us:
And note those street light--there are blocks full of people behind us. And this is just waiting to get into the building, not to get on the train or anything. By this point, standing, not moving, in a giant crowd of people is the absolute last thing I want to be doing ever again in my life. We're all just standing, exhausted, barely talking. We haven't eaten or drank anything or even gone to the bathroom in hours, and oh yeah, since we took a bus down, we had only had a few hours of bus sleep (which doesn't even really count as sleep) before this entire adventure. It was truly grueling. Worth it, 100%, but more exhausting than you can imagine.
Finally we get onto a train:
and ride it all the way back to the furthest station. I manage to grab a seat one stop before ours, so I was sitting down for five minutes top, on an incredibly crowded subway...and I fell asleep. I sat down, passed out, and woke up when the train stopped. That was how just bone-weary I was.
The thing that is most noteworthy to me, though, was how happy the crowd was. Of course there were some assholes, but in general, everyone was just so helpful and happy to be there and just charged. I've never been in an environment like it. It was really and truly incredible.
So yeah. My journey, haha. Truly awesome, in the classical sense of the term.
So yeah. The Inauguration. I was there! And so were a lot of other people. like. A lot. More people than I'd ever seen before in my life. More people than I knew existed. EVERYWHERE. PEOPLE EVERYWHERE.
My school hired a couple buses, and through the sponsoring of a few different groups on campus (Black Student's Union, Women's Caucus, College Dems), bus tickets were only $15, from NY to DC. The bus took us to a metro station in Maryland, we were handed a map, and told to be back to Maryland by 6pm that evening. This was at aprox 3:30am, by the way. We'd gotten on the bus at 8pm the night before.
This is how many people were at the furthest station from DC at 4am.
We arrived in DC, got on the right train and everything (score!), and were on the mall by about 4:30, 4:40. We were walking up the mall, when I noticed a few people start trickling in off the side...and then more people, and then a flood. From comparing notes with friends at other places afterwards, we figured out that they'd opened a second, closer gate where people had been lined up for over an hour at least. I was like, "Oh hell no! We're not letting all those people in front of us!" So I grabbed my friends and we booked it, flat out sprinted for probably five or six blocks of mall. We worked our way up super close to the front. We were packed in pretty tight, but not uncomfortably so at this point. We didn't realize at the time, because you can't really see anything when people are packed that closely, but we were 10-15 people deep from as close to the front as you could get without a ticket.
Observe:
The fence you can kind of see there was as far forward as any of us peons were getting.
Even for this early (It's just after 5am now), the air is electric. There are people singing and chanting and just cheering sporadically for the sheer joy of it. It's cold, but not too bad--maybe 25F. In Rochester, it had been hovering around 0F, so it felt downright comfortable for the first hour or so, especially with all the other people packed around.
Observe the 5am crowd:
We were standing in front of these awesome sassy ladies and just getting to know the people around us. When you're standing with these people for hours, you just start talking. They were from like Ohio or something and just giddy with excitement. The crowd keeps getting more compact and we're being pushed closer and closer together.
About 6am, this guy starts pushing his way through the crowd, muttering something about his mom being just up ahead. By the time he gets to us, it's too dense to even push his way through rudely. There is simply not anywhere else to move to. He's kinda tool-looking, about my age, around 20, white kid from a preppy college. He's with a friend. This friend staggers past me, leans on my shoulder, and elbows me in the boob. I was not ok with this. He also smells strongly of alchohol. Tool-Box is pretty drunk, and his friend Drunky-Pants is schwasted. He can't even stand up. I didn't realize at first because there wasn't enough room for him to walk in a straight line anyway. And then Drunky-pants starts doing that drunk leave over and plant your feet like you're going to vomit thing, and I have never seen a crowd move faster. Suddenly there's like a three foot diameter circle of space around them, which is absolutely luxurious.
People start shouting and yelling, "Get him out of here, get out, what are you doing, he's gonna puke, get him out!" At one point the crowd is actually chanting "Get Him Out!" Tool Bag is all...oh sorry, there's no where to go, sorry, I can't move, which, was bullshit because 1) he just pulled him through crowds and crowds of people so he could have gone back the way he came, and 2) as we just learned, nothing moves a crowd faster than someone who looks like he's gonna puke.
Then Tool Bag starts getting an attitude and yelling like, "I volunteered for Obama for FOUR WEEKS!" like that gave him some sort of a vomit quota or something. AND THEN he was like, "It's because we're white, isn't it?" Which...no, it was because they were drunk as shit. And yeah, we were in an area of mostly black people, but my friends and I, all white, were literally on the front lines, like a foot away from his face.
So finally I reach out, grab his arm gently, and wait until he looks at me. I'm like, "You have to leave. You won't be able to move forward. Go sideways. People will move." He looks at me, grumbles, and then...does what I told him!! The entire crowd cheers me, and the sassy black ladies are all, "ye-ahh! That's our girl! MMMHMM!"
So that was a joyful moment. It was also around this time that we noticed SNIPERS EVERYWHERE. My pictures of them didn't really show up, but, you can kinda see the dots on top of the building here:
As all this is going on, we're getting closer and closer together. Observe:
That wasn't for the picture, that was just how close together we were standing. My range of movement was literally only my head. There were volunteers handing out those little flags, and we were standing so close to people that I didn't even need to hold it up with my hand. I could just let it go and it wouldn't move because there wasn't even an inch of space for it to fall through. It was the work of like five minutes to even get my camera out of my pocket to my face to take this picture. At one point, I got separated from my group. Only by like two people, but that was two people more than I could push my way through. I ended up dropping to the ground and crawling in between people's legs, because it was absolutely the only way I could move forward.
The sun is coming up, and more and more people are coming:
Also with all of this closer and closer together, we're also getting pushed closer and closer to the front. By 8am or so, we are this close:
Again, that fence was as close as any of the unwashed masses were allowed to be. I know I keep repeating we were SO CLOSED and we were SO CRAMPED over and over, but really, we were! For reference, this is the number of people behind us
that's as far as I could see. There were people after and after and after that. An UNENDING MASS OF PEOPLE.
Eventually we can't even handle the crush anymore. like. omg. So we move back a little, just to have enough room to breathe. We're still super close:
but there is a little room to move about. We are also at this point, freezing. We'd been standing outside, in January, without moving, for hours and hours. We were losing feeling in our feet. My feet were at that stage where they've been cold for so long that they're starting to feel warm again, just because they're going numb. It was like something out of wilderness training. We couldn't really sit down because we were afraid of getting trampled, but one of us at a time would sit, and try to rub feeling back into their feet. I was starting to worry, with no hyperbole, that I was going to lose toes. So I grabbed dirty newspaper and subway maps off the ground, took my shoes off, wrapped my feet in the dirty paper that hundred of thousands of people had walked across, and put my shoes back on. It helped a little, but not enough. We had to do something. In retrospect, I hate that we had to leave, after having defended our prime spots for hours, but we were past the point of caring at this point.
We went to a vendor, pooled our money, and bought all the hand warmers we could afford. Again, they helped some, but not enough. However, it was tolerable now.
It's about 11am at this time, and things are starting to happen. Speakers giving talks, senators arriving, etc. There was also a small lol moment where they didn't quite turn off the mics in between actually talking, so we were hearing all this random small talk. My favorite excerpt was some guy who was like, "How's your mom? I love your mom!"
Around 11:30 I think, the past presidents start coming in. The Clintons stood out as being kind of creepy--neither of them were smiling at all, and Bill was holding Hilary's wrist rather than her hand. I have pictures of the screens we saw this on, and can show you if you'd like, but nothing of the people themselves.
Another funny moment--W. came out, and shook some lady's hand as he was walking to his seat. She immediately afterwards wiped her hand off on her skirt. Bush cooties! lol.
The crowd by this point is just going nuts:
The excitment and energy in the air is palpable. Everyone is just enraptured. Whenever someone remotely well known comes out, 2M people just cheer. It's such a rush! I kept hitting this large black man in the head with my energetic flag waving, hahah, and each time I apologized and finally he was like, "baby, everything is nothing today." There was that mood every where--that everything we were suffering through didn't even matter, because the power of this day and this moment and this movement transcended everything.
When Obama was sworn in, and was giving his address, it was the most amazing thing. Just think for a minute--have you ever heard 2M people being silent? It felt like a holy moment, like the whole world was holding their breath to see if this was really happening.
It was absolutely unforgettable.
However, all good things must come to an end, and eventually we all had to try to get out of the city. Because of the parade afterwards, half the streets were blocked off, and no one knew which one. It was a straight up clusterfuck. None of the cops or security knew a thing. The most helpful advice we got was, "Well, walk down that street for a while and maybe eventually you'll find an open metro station." You couldn't see anything, because there'd be a couple hundred thousand people in front of you, so you'd fight your way all the way down the block...and realize that the street was barricaded off for the parade, and that you had to fight your way back upstream, and that you were back where you'd started. It took us maybe 20 minutes to get from the metro to our final place in the morning. In the afternoon, from farther back, it took us about 3.5 hours. And this was after we were freezing and exhausted and had been standing in the cold for more than eight hours straight, without a break.
This is the first metro station we tried to go to:
Obviously that was not happening, so we continued on. and on, and on. This is the one we eventually go to:
This is the people who are still behind us:
And note those street light--there are blocks full of people behind us. And this is just waiting to get into the building, not to get on the train or anything. By this point, standing, not moving, in a giant crowd of people is the absolute last thing I want to be doing ever again in my life. We're all just standing, exhausted, barely talking. We haven't eaten or drank anything or even gone to the bathroom in hours, and oh yeah, since we took a bus down, we had only had a few hours of bus sleep (which doesn't even really count as sleep) before this entire adventure. It was truly grueling. Worth it, 100%, but more exhausting than you can imagine.
Finally we get onto a train:
and ride it all the way back to the furthest station. I manage to grab a seat one stop before ours, so I was sitting down for five minutes top, on an incredibly crowded subway...and I fell asleep. I sat down, passed out, and woke up when the train stopped. That was how just bone-weary I was.
The thing that is most noteworthy to me, though, was how happy the crowd was. Of course there were some assholes, but in general, everyone was just so helpful and happy to be there and just charged. I've never been in an environment like it. It was really and truly incredible.
So yeah. My journey, haha. Truly awesome, in the classical sense of the term.
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Date: 2009-02-03 12:04 am (UTC)