A New Chapter in American History

I spent this past weekend in my nation’s capitol, Washington, DC. This was my first trip to DC, and it was worth every lost hour of sleep, leg cramp and teeth chattering moment.

We arrived at my friends,’ Kristin and Terry, apartment in Arlington, VA early Sunday morning. We spent Sunday wandering around the mall and caught some of the “We are One” concert. This would be our first experience with monumental crowds-only a quarter of what we’d see on Tuesday!

On Monday, we were tourists. We walked all around the downtown area and visited the Museum of American History. Here are some of my favorite shots of Monday.

Tuesday morning, we woke up at 4:30 a.m.! I was so excited for the day that I only grumbled for a few minutes before unzipping myself from my sleeping bag and eagerly grabbing for the cup of coffee Terry was handing me (thank you!). We were up and out by 5 and hopped on the Metro to Arlington Cemetery. We walked over the Potomac, like so many Americans before us, and entered DC. We were greeted on the mall by “volunteers” who kept saying, “Good morning!” to everyone who walked by. We walked as far up to the capitol as we could. Confusion was everywhere. We finally settled on a spot by MSNBC, well, we finally realized that the path had been barricaded ahead of us, and we were stuck!

Everyone around us was in good spirits despite the close quarters. We made some friends with a couple ladies from Florida (Thank you for the life-saving granola bar if you’re reading this!). We stood there, freezing, anticipating, laughing and waiting for about four and a half hours before the “entertainment” arrived. Aretha was a little disappointing ,but we didn’t really care…we knew what was to come next!

After President Obama’s speech, we tried to head out of the crowds and back to Virginia. The crowd was so controlled that we were stuck in our “block” until security removed a giant fence and we were able to walk, in a round-about way, back the way we came.

Even now, the fact that Barack H. Obama is our president has not completely set in. I keep thinking back to his words on Tuesday and the promise for a new America.

Journalists Need a Piece of the Pie

Every day, it seems there’s new news of publishing companies laying off chunks of their workforce. Today, I stumbled upon this article by Mark I. Pinsky for The New Republic. In it, Pinsky suggest that along with his New Deal inspired infrastructure plan, President-elect Barack Obama should reinstitute the Federal Writers Project.

The revamped project would give jobs to writers and historians and give them the opportunity to record the state of things today. It would keep the industry afloat and serve as a means to cover topics not included in mainstream media.

Pinksy writes, “This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics. As an example, oral history as a discipline has made great strides in the past 70 years, and with the development of video techniques, the forum of the Internet could make these multi-media interviews widely available to schools and scholars, as well as to average Americans.”

Though this idea may be rather pie-in-the-sky because most of the attention in this depression has been on the financial and auto industries, I think Pinksy’s article did a wonderful job at using the U.S.’s past experiences to suggest a possible solution for today’s media.

What would your story be?

Obama Biden 2008

Barack Obama has announced his running mate! Please take a moment to read about Biden and watch this video from Biden himself! VOTE FOR CHANGE!