The Inauguration Set Me Free

I didn’t expect to weep. I know I’ve been stressed, mostly due to the pandemic, I thought. But watching the inauguration, I started to cry and realized that four years of Trump had taken its toll on my soul. The chaos, cruelty, greed, and lack of basic decency and empathy made every day, every tweet, every anxious checking of the day’s news an agony. It was a burden to which I had become so accustomed that its weight and the pain it caused became part of my life.

Watching Kamala Harris take the oath touched me the same way as the Grant Park rally celebrating Obama’s 2008 victory. I felt hope and change once again. I was proud as a woman to hear Harris addressed as Madam Vice President. I wept as Lady Gaga sang a heartfelt version of our National Anthem, a song that has sometimes filled me with shame and despair. I cried as Jennifer Lopez belted out a medley of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land and America the Beautiful. I sighed when Garth Brooks sang Amazing Grace, remembering President Obama singing it at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was killed, along with eight others, by a white nationalist in a shooting at a Charleston church.