I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Agnes Moses watched a black man become president Tuesday. And she cried.
They were tears of seeing the unexpected, of seeing a sight for which you’d hoped against hope for but never really thought you’d see.
“I never even imagined a black president, much less voting for him, that it would really happen, never crossed my mind,” said Moses, a former chairman for the Santa Fe chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Moses uttered these words moments after Barack Obama had delivered his inaugural speech and after becoming the 44th president of the United States.
“It’s overwhelming,” Moses’ son, Brad, interjected.
Moses and her son were not alone in brimming over with emotion. The mother and son were part of more than 500 who had gathered at the Santa Fe Convention Center to watch history being made.
And Moses and her son sat a table near Lt. Gov. Diane Denish and Attorney General Gary King near the front of the room. Nearby sat Secretary of State Mary Herrera and state Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez.
Behind the Moseses, people filled the cavernous room, either sitting at 50 or so tables or lining the walls or filling the back of the room.
Mostly, it was a respectful crowd. It cheered exuberantly when Aretha Franklin sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and when Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma were about to play. The crowd whooped and hollered when a CNN anchor broke in to tell viewers that Obama was president even though he had not taken the oath of office. The hour of noon east coast time had struck.
A few people in the crowd at the convention center hissed when pastor Rick Warren delivered the inaugural invocation. But his words seemed to stir something in the crowd.
Perhaps it was when Warren said, “We know that Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting,” or when he said we are a nation “united not by race, religion or blood, but by freedom and justice for all.”
But the crowd’s greatest cheers, and exuberance, were saved for the man of the hour — Barack Obama.
The crowd repeatedly punctuated Obama’s inaugural address with whoops, yells and repeated cheers. The crowd let their happiness be known when Obama talked of the bitter politics in Washington, saying “As the scripture says, ‘The time has come to set aside childish things.’”
A reminder of the divisions that have riven this country in recent years surfaced periodically, as when the crowd cheered at this phrase: We will “restore science to its rightful place.” Or at this one: We are a “friend to each nation.”
At the end of the speech, Agnes Moses and her son stood, clapping.
And her eyes were glistening.
