GAZETTE COLUMN: THE ENDURING STRENGTH OF OUR CONSTITUTION by John P. Flannery

John & Holly Flannery at the Inauguration

The first inauguration of President Barack Obama was a celebration of a dream fulfilled and foreseen by the Reverend Martin Luther King.

My wife Holly and I wanted to be present in person at the second inauguration because we knew that, however much the first Inauguration marked how far we’d come, the second Inauguration would be about how far we hoped to go as a nation

We asked our Republican Representative in the U.S. Congress, Frank Wolf, if he had two tickets so that we could attend.  Dan Scandling, the Congressman’s Chief of Staff, immediately responded, by return e-mail, that he had tickets for us.  We thanked the Congressman and his staff.   No doubt many others thanked him as well for the opportunity to attend a Presidential Inauguration.  The President described why we gather to inaugurate a President.  It is because thereby “we bear witness to the enduring strength of our constitution” and “affirm the promise of our democracy.”

We traveled from Lovettsville to a Dulles parking lot to join others from as far away as Texas to ride downtown in a rented van.  We were there bundled up in the dark chilly morning air at 5 AM.  We didn’t know then there would be 800,000 people attending.  We only knew that DC had to be secure and difficult to navigate.

When we crossed the bridge from Virginia, we found Humvees blocking off ramps and roads, saw many rotating blue lights, and National Guard troops and police handling traffic and pedestrians and explaining how best and where to go.

The streets were almost empty in a yellowish glow of street lamps.  When we came upon a coffee shop at about 10^th Street near the mall, it seemed everyone was in there and no one was outside.  And it was warm.  We stood shoulder to shoulder with visitors from across the nation, from California to New York, from Washington to Florida, and uniformed officers from Maryland and DC, talking about when they arrived and their duty assignments.

The atmosphere was helpful and friendly like we were all going to a fine party.  Soon we found the crowds massing at the entry points to the mall and we walked further up toward Union Station as our space was on the West Side of the Capitol – where we would be able to see and hear the President.  There were pearls and mink, Sunday clothes, hawkers selling memorabilia. 

At 7AM the gates opened and, although we would stand or sit in the cold until 11:30 AM before the scheduled events were underway, the time flew by talking to people who traveled great distances or just walked across town.

When the President finally spoke and said “what makes us American … is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago,” there was a cheer that rolled from the Lincoln Memorial where the Reverend King once spoke to the West face of the Capitol where President Obama was now speaking.

He repeated how, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and he said that this day we “continue[d] a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.”  He said that, “history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.”  With this, there was more applause.  As I looked around the eyes were on the President.  Tears flowed down the faces of men and women.  Small children asked to be lifted to see their president.

The President pledged that “together” we are resolved to “care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”  He asked the crowd and the nation watching to “do these things together, as one nation and one people.”  There was enthusiastic applause. 

He asked the crowd to remember “who left footprints along this great Mall” where we were assembled for the Inauguration, and who heard “a preacher say that we cannot walk alone,” and who came before “to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth.”

When it was done and the crowd moved to the parade route or to eat or to busses or cars to leave, strangers spoke to each other about what they’d seen and heard, enthused for the nation, and its future.

Ringing in their ears were the President’s words that each of us has “the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient and enduring ideals.”

GAZETTE COLUMN: PEOPLE GO POLAR ON THE POTOMAC - J. Flannery

Some people jump into icy cold water for no good reason. 

By contrast, on January 22, 2011, 200 men and women, from 7 to 74 years of age, with an air temperature of 17 degrees, took a frigid polar bear plunge into the Potomac at Maryland’s National Harbor, downstream from the U.S. Congress, demanding that our political leaders save real polar bears from extinction – as well as their human kissin’ cousins.

The demand is that Congress adopt policies to decrease carbon emissions from 388 parts per million of carbon dioxide to 350 parts, a safe level (see http://www.350.org/ )

My wife Holly planned to swim while I held hot drinks, foot warmers, towels, a thick terry cloth robe, my camera and yellow sheets for notes.  You can see why I couldn’t make the plunge myself.

Some disbelievers might wonder if cold weather doesn’t contradict the science of global warming.  But extreme weather conditions are averaged with other climate phenomenon.  They don’t change the fact that the average temperature worldwide has gone up 1.4 degrees since 1880, and that we had our hottest temperatures in 400 years in the last several decades.  The average temperature in Alaska, Western Canada and Eastern Russia have increased almost twice as fast as the global average.  We’ve seen Antarctica melting.  Islands and shore lines are receding.  Arctic ice is disappearing rapidly, and an ice free summer there is now foreseeable.  Polar bears are at risk, as they lose their sea ice habitat, the ice platforms they hunt from and that protect them from drowning.  They are losing more young, starving, and every fifth bear is dying.

Hundreds milled in clusters with polar bear caps and hot coffee in hand, the last folk song finished, the wind blowing, ice rimming the Potomac, as Mike Tidwell, the founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (www.chesapeakeclimate.org), reassured the polar bear plungers in waiting that some swimmer had been doing this for years, proving you “can survive the plunge,” and remind congress that “the science isn’t lying.” 

Last year, the National Research Council released, “Advancing the Science of Climate Change,” confirming once again that global warming is caused by what we humans do.

Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards said she was “warming up” to the plunge and invited citizens to “lean on us” in Congress to get something done; she was backed up by San Francisco 49ers inside linebacker, NaVorro Bowman.

As the polar plungers dropped off their clothes in nearby tents and emerged unprotected in swimsuits in the winds along the icy banks, a cheer went up and they raced as one splashing into the icy waters.

Among those in trunks was Franciscan Father Jacek Orzeshowski who told us that he made the plunge because combating global warming was a “moral and spiritual challenge” and “faith communities are embracing this movement,” so we can “defend the powerless,” avoid extinction, and save the “awesome diversity of life;” he prayed that all who plunged may enjoy the “fire of grace in our bellies.”  May it be the same for those who fight global warming everywhere!