Get Inaugural!

Well, January 20th has come and gone, and thankfully everything was, while exciting and wild, still peaceful - a success. Our home, Washington, DC, served as a wonderful host to hundreds of thousands of people. People who came here to celebrate a new hope, a new purpose, and a new commitment to making our nation a better place to live, and a better place for our children to grow up. It would appear that those people served as good guests as well.

Jena and I wandered down towards the Capitol around 11:15 on Inauguration Day to see if we could at least hear what was going on, but things were blocked off pretty good, so we went back home and watched in our living room, where the wind chill wasn't a factor. I know that not everyone was wowed by our new President's speech, but I was.

He has made all the campaign speeches. He already has everyone excited. This inaugural speech was about telling people it was time. Time to start fulfilling our promise. Time to remind everyone that this land is OUR land. That the government's purpose is to allow everyone the pursuit of happiness, and not to guarantee it. That much is up to all of us. It's time for each of us to do our part in remaking the American dream. I hope that all the talk and the excitement doesn't fade, like so many children's toys that fall from favor days or weeks after they are given to them.

Real, tangible action will do so much to keep the momentum. The new whitehouse.gov site was a great start - it's not perfect, but the fact is, it's symbolic of the new administration - here's what we are doing, come and see. This says to me "this administration will not do something that we can't share, because if we can't share it, it's not something we should be doing." Obviously this doesn't apply to clandestine services, but most of what we do as a government should be distilled in a manner that allows the average interested American to understand what, how and why it's happening.

I will be interested to see how the agenda is reconciled on the site itself - so, here was the administration's agenda, and here's what really happened, here's links to votes on topics, here's discussion on this issue, etc. There are so many possibilities. Let's see what becomes reality. I for one am certainly optimistic - change is always good when things are going wrong. Different is better, at least at first, and now we just have to work together to keep it going.