What the Obama Inauguration Means to Me

I was one of probably thousands of individuals who sent the Obama Team an essay on the following question: "What does Barak Obama's inauguration mean to you?" 10 winners were selected to attend the inauguration, and while I didn't win, I still think it's a pretty good essay, and a great way to start my "Nathan's Noodles" Blog:


The inauguration of Mr. Barak Obama to the United States Presidency means that over the coming years, I will be faced with a daily challenge to my latent choices of fear over action, drama over partnership, mediocrity over excellence, and selfishness over service.

In this life, we all face challenges that make it difficult to fulfill our vision for a better tomorrow. However, on inauguration day the leader of the free world – and our foremost role model – will be a man who was not challenged by the assumption that he couldn’t be elected, but who instead challenged the validity of that assumption. Rather than accept the limitations that the world would put on him, our President will be a man who chose something different, something better, something more difficult but also far more worthwhile.

Every day of Mr. Obama’s Presidency will be a reminder to me and to all Americans that the world we are born into never limits us, but instead it gives each of us a unique set of choices. This is our greatest freedom – the freedom to choose – and that freedom is paid in the currency of consequence.

In the coming years, as I watch the unlikeliest of Presidents do his job, I will see that the power and prestige that he wields is not an accident of birth or the product of luck, but the consequence of choice. He chose to live a life that is far better than anyone could have imagined for him, and if he can make that choice, what is stopping me from doing the same? Is today’s distraction worth the price of a future I can be proud of? When those who don’t understand my vision obstruct its fulfillment, will I retreat and then blame them for my failure? When I have given all of myself, and still more is needed, will I console myself that I’ve given enough, or will I find a way to dig even deeper?

I will find the answers to these questions in the unassuming, brown eyes of a man who should never have been President but chose to be anyway, and what I will see there is that I hold the power of choice – Only I can choose to be even stronger than my circumstances. For if there is anything to be learned from Mr. Obama’s historic victory, it is that the world we live in is not a monolithic obstacle to our greatest hopes and dreams, but instead it is the sum total of all our choices. If we have the power to choose hatred, division, war, and greed, then we also have the power to choose compassion, unity, peace, and charity. Our individual choices cannot help but to change the world we live in, so that hopefully, someday, all of our fellow human beings across the globe will know the power of their undeniable freedom, their unstoppable power to choose a better tomorrow for themselves, for their children, and for every generation to come.

Mr. Obama won the Presidency by reminding us of the power that each of us has to choose something better, and on January 20th his pledge to serve the American people as President will be a call for all of us to serve our collective vision of a world that is better today than it was yesterday. I will answer that call, and with President Barak Obama as a living example of life’s truest possibilities, I know that I will succeed because his Presidency will be an unavoidable reminder of the consequence of individual choice, and as a result, anything less than my very best is a choice that I can not and will not accept.