[Leica] IMG: Inauguration - long

[sethrosner at nycap.rr.com (Seth Rosner)]

Friends,

I awakened this morning at 3:30 thinking about this startling day. Felt less 
sleepy when I considered that it was already 0830 GMT. Here's what I was 
thinking: I chose to become a lawyer because as a child, I heard almost 
nightly at our dinner table my dad telling Mom, my brother and me (Dad, 
brother and I became law partners) what he had done for and with his clients 
that day. And I saw the pleasure and satisfaction that he got, just plain 
helping people. That was my motivation to become a lawyer: to be able to 
help people, whether it was in buying a home, writing a will, starting a 
business.

Mine was a politically aware family, among my dad's good friends were United 
States Senators and Congressmen; his very small law firm in New York City 
represented Fiorello LaGuardia, New York's Mayor, in his personal matters. 
This as a background to my feelings yesterday.

As during Obama's election night speech, during yesterday's ceremony and his 
speech, I was several times not only in tears, I was sobbing, almost 
hiccuping, with joy that I had lived to see and share this day, not just 
with my compatriots but with people around the world. Did you see the live 
video of schoolchildren in Kenya watching? It was almost too much joy to 
bear.

Last night I answered Ric with the comment that the nightmare is over. But 
that is too brief and inadequate a description of what the Cheney-Bush 
administration has brought to my country and to the world.

This has been the most unprincipled, arrogant, imperial, destructive, 
shameful, deceitful, lying, venal, corrupt, anti-constitutional and just 
plain evil gang of thugs ever to have controlled the government of my 
country. They have been motivated and guided by no principle, none 
whatsoever, other than money and the perpetuation of power. I except the 
ex-President from many of these adjectives. For I believe that the saddest 
and most frightening thing is that G. W. Bush has been too simple to 
understand how he has been used by the gang. He truly believes that his 
decisions were in the best interests of the nation and its friends around 
the world.

The other truly frightening thing about their reign is that almost half of 
our citizens voted for them - TWICE. I am heartened by the fact that a good 
number of lawyers from around the United States whom I've met and with whom 
I've become good friends through the American Bar Association, its House of 
Delegates and Board of Governors, told me last fall that they were 
Republicans from birth, that neither they, their wives, their parents, 
grandparents and in several cases great grandparents who had gone west in 
covered wagons, had ever voted "democrat" but that their 'Grand Old Party' 
had gone very badly astray and that they were going to vote for Obama.

There, got it off my chest and to my LUG friends who are still reading, my 
thanks for your patience.

The nightmare is indeed over.

IT'S A BRAND NEW DAY!

Love and kisses,

Seth