After we reached the climactic event of the week, the inauguration, things in DC seemed to calm down. After sleeping in until 9, high school students shared stories with their fellow classmates over breakfast and teachers laughed as they spoke about the tactics they used in order to keep their group together while weaving through the mass of people.
On our day trip we toured the Senate building and saw the Capital, the White House and the Supreme Court up-close. In front of the Supreme Court, pro-life protesters flaunted their opinions on abortion, which wasn’t as interesting to me as the fact that protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court is against the law.
Albany students split up into two groups. One group, me included, visited the Holocaust Museum, while the other group visited the Spy Museum. The Holocaust Museum focused on the extermination of the Jewish people in Germany during World War II, but includes videos about ongoing genocide around the world in places such as Rwanda and China.
After reading about how Jewish communities were organized into ghettos and how, eventually, the people who lived there were sent to concentration camps, I realized how difficult it is to truly understand how many people were killed. Unless a person were to physically stand in a field with 11 million people, who, within a period of 4-5 years, all disappeared, how could they comprehend the number of people who were killed? People judge things by what they know. Therefore, the most moving part for the majority of Albany High School students was being informed of how victims were treated visually.
That night, students who attended Close Up Academy met for the last time at the farewell banquet. Mariah, who had won our mock presidential election, gave a short inaugural speech. After she spoke, Simon, the director of the program, encouraged students to stay involved in politics and to share the experience with friends and family at home. A dance completed the goodbye celebration.
Overall, Close-Up is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. I waited for 6 hours in freezing cold weather and watched the sun rise over the Capital in the middle of winter. I danced with 2 million fellow Americans to the song ‘Shout’ in a sad attempt to stay warm. I felt the energy and the emotion of the screaming crowd that surrounded me. I was able to witness the horrors of the past, live in the joy of the present, and understand the struggles that inevitably lie in the future. This week truly gave me a whole new perspective on politics and our country. Hopefully, our 44th president, Barack Obama, will be the fresh breath of air we need in order to assemble a stable country.
“People will judge you based on what you build; not what you destroy.” -President Barack Obama
Update:
Previously, I wrote that Barack Obama made a mistake while repeating the inaugural oath; it was actually Supreme Court Justice John Roberts who failed at delivering it correctly. Because President Obama didn’t know what to do, he stuttered, and repeated the wrong oath. This resulted in a second oath, executed after the inauguration in private by President Obama.
