By Derek Spellman
dspellman@joplinglobe.com
WASHINGTON — Paxton Williams awoke early Tuesday and hiked 20 blocks to stand in line.
Tessa Foti rose at 4:45 a.m. to board a bus that would take her and other classmates through the Capitol’s frigid temperatures and to a glimpse of history.
Tom Brown woke at about the same time, later making his way onto a crowded Metro.
Doug Brooks, a member of the Democratic National Committee, said crowds were so dense that he couldn’t even make it to his spot to catch the speech, so he was forced to watch Barack Obama’s inaugural address on television in the office of U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D.-Mo.
“Exciting. Exhilarating. Moving,” Williams said in a telephone interview just hours after watching Obama deliver his first official speech as president.
Williams, executive director of the George Washington Carver Birthplace Association, was standing by the reflecting pool of the Capitol when he heard the speech.
“I liked the [passages] about inclusion,” Williams said, referring particularly to Obama’s statement that, “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”
That section, Williams said, highlighted a larger tone of inclusion.
“That was very inspiring. That is what we need,” he said.
Brown, a self-employed carpenter from Webb City, went to the inauguration with his wife and stood “far behind” the reflecting pool. They watched Obama’s address on one of the giant television screens throughout Washington.
Brown said the speech, like Obama’s election, was about “making us a more accepting society” and signaled that the country accepts and embraces its diversity.
“I think we have taken a giant step in that direction,” he said.
Foti, of Joplin, a sixth-grader at St. Peter’s Middle School in Joplin, said she and a group of between 30 and 40 people from her school made the trek to Washington D.C. Like tens of thousands of others, they stood in the cold and watched the address on one of the giant screens.
“It was really cold, but it was worth it,” she said.
Foti said she was most struck by Obama’s declarations that the country would meet — and overcome — the problems it now faces.
‘Good tone’
Doug Brooks, a Joplin psychologist and member of the Democratic National Committee, praised Barack Obama’s international message, pointing out that the target audience of his speech was not just Americans. The speech, he said, had a “firmness” that was nonetheless tempered by offers of “holding out a hand” to those willing to take it.
“I thought he took a good tone internationally,” Brooks said.
