Guest blog: Read what the director of the SIU School of Journalism has to say

Guest blog: Read what the director of the SIU School of Journalism has to say about the students’ trip to Washington.

Mystique of inauguration always draws people to Washington

By William H. Freivogel, director of the SIU School of Journalism, for the Saint Louis Beacon - Presidential inaugurations are dramatic moments when the nation takes a breath and turns a page, leaving behind a piece of history and venturing off on a new beginning, full of hope and the opportunity for renewal.

That's why Americans by the millions have begun their cold trek to Washington, D.C., to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. Most of the two or three or four million people who will jam into the national Mall won't have tickets, won't be able to see the inaugural parade, don't have an invitation to a ball and probably won't be able to make out Obama's features when he is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.
They will spend hours in airports, train stations or on tour buses. They will freeze in the cold winter air and use smelly porta-potties after standing in long lines. They will crane their necks for a view or stare up at jumbotrons with electronic images they could have watched from the warmth of their living rooms.

But they come because inaugurations are more than speeches, parades and balls. They are ceremonies that plant in the consciousness, both individual and collective, a bright, shiny memory of an extraordinary day when things changed.
Cole Singleton of O'Fallon, Ill., is one of the 98 Southern Illinois University Carbondale journalism students and friends who boarded a bus at 2 a.m. Monday to start the journey. After a short night in a motel in western Maryland, they'll get back on the bus at 2 a.m. Tuesday to join the crush of people converging on Washington.

For Singleton, a promising senior advertising student who headed the National Association of Black Journalists' chapter on campus, the inauguration is the climactic moment of a centuries-long struggle. "This is the culmination of my grandparents' and their parents' work," he wrote in an e-mail. "All that they went through and Obama is the end product. They suffered so I can witness this with my own eyes and live to tell about it. This is a once in a lifetime event that I will always remember for the rest of my life. I will tell my kids and grand kids that I was in Washington for the inauguration of our first African-American president."

Zlatko Filipovic is covering the event for River Region, the SIUC student TV station. For him, the history-making nature of the event is also important, but from an entirely different vantage point. He and his family came to the U.S. from Bosnia a decade ago. They see the Obama victory as proof of America's promise. "I am very excited to go to Washington," he wrote, "because this is truly a historic event: the first African-American president who is not divisive, but inclusive and a president, who for the first time ever, sees all American people and people of the world as one, no matter what religion, nationality, political party, sexual orientation, etc. He is a true role model. And because I came to America ten years ago from Bosnia with my parents and older brother, it makes me believe that I, too, can truly do anything and that the sky is the limit."

And then there's Elissa Hopkins-Renzaglia, a Southern Illinois winery worker who believes in the "hope" and "change" that Obama promised. "I have endured eight years of the Bush administration's ignorance, embarrassment and corruption," she wrote. "By voting in this past election my vote represents a newer Washington, a place where hope prevails and prayers will be answered. A place where the heart is. Very simply stated Obama gives me a reason to celebrate good times to come in this country and I look forward to attending his inauguration and proud to be an American."

Read the rest of Freivogel’s blog at the Saint Louis Beacon.