Guest Blogger...

I have attached a "few" pictures taken from our trip to D.C. As many of you know, I'm not the best writer and one of the reason I started this blog was to get better at putting my thoughts on paper. However, if you know my husband I'm a little biased but I believe he is a fantastic writer and that is why I asked him if I could use what he wrote for a piece that will be used at Augustana in a magazine published for the alumni. I hope you enjoy.











To know the sound one has to recall Rafiki, the shamanistic baboon who councils Simba to return to Pride Rock and reset the circle of life. When Simba sprints towards home Rafiki bellows a high-pitched “Woooooo!” Three times he does this, each louder and more triumphantly satisfying than the previous. That, my friend, is the sound which emanated from my lungs; fists raised high, head thrown back, eyes and cheeks moistened, as I stood among the great throng on the National Mall when Barack Hussein Obama was sworn into the office of President of the United States on Tuesday, January 20, 2009.
Prior to that moment I had always known I was an American. But without every seeing a different sort of face gracing our currency or the office walls of official buildings, and being the hue of so many of America’s civil victims, that feeling was never completely finished. To understand perhaps I should compare to pregnancy. Ask any woman who has completed a term and she will tell you certainly there is a difference between knowing you are pregnant at twelve weeks and feeling you are pregnant a week from said due date. They are two entirely different notions. And I believe my sentiment to be echoed by millions of dark-skinned Mississippians, Kansans, Texans, Iowans, and so on for more than four hundred years of North American inhabitance. And none of that American past shall be erased by the election of a dark-skinned Hawaiian, for it is impossible to do and still the sting of our past remains within the elderly who lived it or those brought up by the generations that lived it prior, or those unable as yet to feel inclusion within recent progress because of the lingering effects of continued -isms. But now I feel it.
Following the pronouncement, as I had been since arriving so very early to claim an unfettered view of the Capital and well-stationed jumbotrons – we were at least a mile in back, just feet from the Monument - I waved and waved my little flag on the Mall like all others who held theirs. It was then I realized the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, each viewed for the first time within the majestic rotunda of the National Archives, stood to be more than just simple facts about a country I and my nearest ancestors wore born within. After hearing those words, “So help me, God,” and seeing that grand city, and waving that little flag with the approximate 1.8 million fellow Americans of every belief and blemish, I know, I feel, I believe with every fiber of my being that I, like others who place hands over their hearts before random sporting events, am an American through and through, have always been, and, again, with every fiber of my being, forever will be. We are all brothers and sisters simply because we have the same home.

Eric J. Rowell