I ran on the treadmill and watched the inauguration before I had to go to work. My mother's family was from the South and in my opinion the most terribly racist people I know. My mother grew up with sharecropper families skirting her father's property in S.C. She wrote a story once about how her little neighbor friend stopped going to school in the 3rd grade because her family needed her home to work the farm. My mother was told by her father that she could no longer be friends with that girl, and when my mother asked why, she told she was too old to have a 'nigger' for a playmate. Her father told me when I was 19 that if I got married he'd give me a $100 bill, but that if I married a black man I could expect to never see the family again. I have no idea how people get to be so mean and closed off to other humans. I know, had my mother been alive today, regardless of political affiliation, she would have been happy to see the civil rights movement she was a part of in the 60's come full circle. I was moved by President Obama's speech, his gratitude of those who have fought for and died for this country, made sacrifices, worked hard to make this country great. Time will be the judge of whether or not his deeds are bigger than his words. But it was something I'll never forget to have witnessed a moment significant in history for myself. | 