Inauguration Impression: Brook Silva-Braga

WASHINGTON, D.C.—To some, the promise of this new presidency is greater power for normal people. For those of us at today’s inauguration the logistics of participating fulfilled that promise in bizarre and even troubling ways as a meager uniformed security presence crumbled under the weight of a determined, large and very well behaved crowd.

I was already excitedly awake when my alarm sounded at 5:45am, and by 6:15 was on a Metro train bound for the capital. The station nearest the ceremony was full so the train skipped it and when we finally got off at Third Street the city was swarming an hour before sunrise.

Two months ago I requested inauguration tickets from Senators Reed and Whitehouse and Representative Kennedy. A call one evening last month from Senator Whitehouse’s office brought very good news: My name had been pulled in their ticket lottery.

The Senator’s office says they received 393 tickets and the man who handed me mine yesterday implied they were all given to constituents, though almost everyone else I know throughout the country who scored tickets did so through connections, not through a lottery. A friend who works for a congressman—and got four tickets from him—correctly predicted that my tickets, won with luck rather than proximity to power, would be in the most-distant section of the capital grounds.

There has been a small fever surrounding the 240,000 inaugural tickets, which are distributed free by congress but have sold online for about $500 each. It was because the tickets seemed so valuable that this morning was so very strange.

My 6:30am we were in an endless line waiting for the security gates to open at 8:00. As they did, masses of people came pouring in from all over, skipping a line that had formed hours before dawn. For those who woke at 3am this was highly discouraging.

After a cursory security pat down—far less thorough than what ticketholders closer to the stage received—we entered a large area facing the capital. It was at that moment that many of us realized that no one would be checking our tickets. As it turned out this was true even in sections closer to the stage; those tickets that seemed so valuable and were held so dear weren’t even needed. All you had to do was walk in.

At the front of our section you could see a video screen in the distance and the stage much farther in the distance. My companion and I sat down for a makeshift picnic, knowing the oath of office was still three hours away. After some minutes, a shout went up and the crowd surged forward. The two plastic barriers had been pushed over by a crush of people in the large, half-full pen. We moved haltingly forward and eventually a single police officer approached the broken fence.

“Go back where you were,“ he shouted. But that was not in the cards.

With only five or six uniformed officers patrolling a section of many thousand it became a peaceful mob rule. Police never attempted to use force to control the crowd or even seriously tried to tell them where to go. So the crowd moved up to the edge of the frozen reflection pool and many of us even walked around it, finding a prime viewing location on the raised platform in front of the reflection pool, twice as close to the stage as planned.

We lined up just under (and in some cases on) the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial. The statue to the Civil War general points down the Mall to the memorial to his wartime president, Abraham Lincoln. But everyone on the platform faced in the opposite direction of the bronze General they stood beside. They looked instead towards the new president, even as Lincoln and his great war were somehow on their mind.

It was a credit both to the crowd and those controlling the crowd that it was able to behave so well without any official supervision. It was also tremendously bizarre to see virtually all the country’s most powerful officials assembled two football fields away while we stood directly in front of the capital in an area not meant for spectators and were left to stay there.

We didn’t have a clear view of the video screens and few brought binoculars, so this great moment in our history was experienced by hearing our 44th president but not really seeing him. Instead what we saw from this improbable little sliver of Washington was everyone else: the masses stretched on either side.

When it was over, the reflection pool behind us was frozen by this chilly January and emboldened by all the freedom we’d been granted so far, a cautious few went slip-sliding across the ice. We weren’t stopped of course because we were the only ones there and by now it was clear this was the people’s inauguration.

Read Previous Blog: Inaugural Impressions: A new kind of patriotism

Brook Silva-Braga is a Rhode Island native.  The Portsmouth filmmaker’s documentary “One Day in Africa“ will premiere in March.