As lots of us take time from our daily routines to watch the swearing-in of President Obama, I have a sense of the progress that we’ve made. In the big picture, I am struck by the grace and dignity with which the transition of power has been made. George Bush and Obama have handled themselves, and compelled others to handle themselves, in a way that I hope becomes a model for how the tough problems facing our country and the world will be approached. Without giving a history lesson, it hasn’t always been so. The very short form: we all need to work together.

On a personal level,  I think back to my middle-school days outside of Chicago. There was a woman who taught “etiquette classes” and routinely used the school directory to contact students and their families — except for the blacks and Jews. (Not that there were a whole lot of us!) I’m not that old, but this was still a time when a meeting of class parents could actually include a debate over whether it was appropriate for “Miss W” to use the school to recruit in such a manner. She was eventually commanded by the administration to invite everyone, but by then we were hardly going to patronize her. I know my dinner forks as well as the kids who paid to learn that stuff.

Many of you who are younger would be hard pressed to imagine such exclusion; many of you who are older would see that story as a trivial indignity compared to what you and others experienced. To me, it’s a backdrop to what I’ll be witnessing today.

Interestingly, the Twins website includes a link to live inaugural coverage, as does startribune.com.

Back to baseball. The TwinsFest player schedule is here. Interesting news about Joe Mauer’s health and the pursuit of Eric Gagne here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 10:08 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.