Okay, so now that I’ve had time to recover slightly from Tuesday, I figured I should go ahead and post my experience from witnessing history.  First things first.  Shame on anyone who lived in the Northern Virginia, Maryland or DC area and didn’t go.  Particularly those between the ages of 18 – 25 and those that have no physical reason why they couldn’t stand in the cold.  If you had to work or you just knew that your knees couldn’t take the 12 hour stand…then okay…fine.  I won’t mention how I saw old men and women around the ages of 80 (EIGHTY) standing around me.  Complaining about how you didn’t go cause it was too cold, too many people, etc. seem pretty pathetic when you consider there were some people in WHEELCHAIRS outside on the mall at 4 am.  But anyway…I digress.

So, my first mistake was only getting a 90 minute power nap in before heading out to the metro.  I went to bed at 1:00 am and woke up at 2:30 am.  I have no idea what I was thinking.  I groggily sit up at 2:45 and start to get my survival kit together.  Four 5 Hour energies, my $7 K-Mart Blue Light Special gloves, my Bomber Jacket, granola bars, small bottle of Gaterade, video camera, digital camera and extra batteries.  Some quick notes about some of my stuff

1.  I had the granola bars because I wasn’t going to fuck with the food they had down there.  Think about it.  They were talking between 2 – 4 million people.  About ½ to ¾ of that was black.  There’s not enough chicken in DC to feed that many black folk.  So, that small ass chicken leg you ate probably was a Pigeon. And that hot dog?  Say hello to DC rat.

2.  Getting my metro farecard took about 30 minutes at 11:45 the night before.  I got behind a family of 15 that was trying to put exact change on all their cards.  I stood behind them as they scrounged around for nickels to put exactly $7.35 on each of their farecards.  Then there were the two dudes that bought 20 farecards with $2 on each.

So, I wake up KY who crashed at my place so she could roll with me to the metro station.  We’re out the door by 3:15.  I was surprised that there was no traffic.  When we pull up to the Largo station, we’re like the number 7 car and there’s a slight line to get into the station.  By 3:30 or so they let everyone in and we meet up with everyone else in the first car.  By 4 am we’re heading into DC.  Now, Largo is the beginning of the line.  At 4 am…it’s already packed leaving the FIRST station.  The metro operator was obligated to stop at all the stops between Largo and L’Enfant because some people still had to go to work.  Each time he stopped he told the people on the platform that another train was coming in 6 minutes.  After about 20 – 30 minutes we arrive at L’Enfant and of course there’s a mad dash to get out of the station.  We take a detour however and try to hit the bathrooms and the McDonalds first.  It’s 4:30 am and the L’Enfant bathrooms already smell like piss and ass but I knew that it would be infinitely better than whatever state the porta potties would be in.  We make our way down 7^th Street to get to the Mall when we are stopped because they won’t let people through.  They keep saying we have to wait.  I still don’t know why they wouldn’t let us through because I could see other people a few blocks away being let in.  Then this douchebag of a cop shows up.  I don’t know, maybe he was salty because the extra security meant he couldn’t take his favorite hooker back into the alley.  I don’t know what his problem was.  I just know he was a dickwad.  First he tried to run over a hundred people with is car when he tried to turn down 7^th.  He keeps hitting his siren and telling us to get out of the way and we’re yelling “Hey Fucker…we can’t move to get out of the way because there’s a thousand people standing here.”  I’ll get to his other douchebag moment in a minute.  So apparently volunteers didn’t know they had to show up on time and so every 5 seconds we had to try to make a hole so they could squeeze by us.  There was this one annoying lady who kept yelling “Volunteers, we have more volunteers coming through.”  It wasn’t bad the first couple of times but around the 10^th time I felt myself getting violent.  But then I clamed down because I didn’t want to be THAT guy that ruined Obama’s inauguration.  Then some lady from the press on the other side of the fence (at least I think she was press) started yelling over the fence for some dude named Melvin, Marvin or something like that to come through the fence.  Now…you have a crowd that is growing pretty quickly and is probably around 1000 or more.  So you can imagine when she yells for this guy to come through the fence, you have about 400 jackasses saying “Yup that’s me.”  To make it worse, she then says “No he’s got a camera” after which 500 more Jackasses (myself included) said “Shit, I have a camera.”  Anyway…back to Officer Douchebag.  So I guess by now it’s like 5:30 or so and they finally decide that they can no longer keep holding us back because the crowd is just getting too big.  So they start to let us through.  Now, we’re pretty close to the front.  I can see what’s about to happen.  I say out loud “No Wal-Mart”…because while I came to witness history, I had no intentions of actually being a part of it due to the fact that someone around me got trampled.  Of course, as soon as I say that the Old lady in front of me trips over her own feet and falls down to the ground.  To be fair she could have tripped over the orange cone Officer Douchebag left sitting there.  So now I have an old lady on the ground in front of me and a surging mob of a thousand people behind me.  So I do what any former Boy Scout would do and with the help of KY and a few others we try to help the old lady up and hold the crowd back.  Officer Douchebag on the other hand decides he’s going to yell out “Back up!!! Or I’m going to start spraying all of you!!!” and it’s at this point that I’ve had enough with this ass clown and I stand up, look him in the face and yell back “We’re helping her the fuck up you idiot.”  I was pissed.  If he had started macing the crowd people would have gone crazy and that lady would have died.  The lady finally is back on her feet and we continue on.  I just want to state that I saved and old woman’s life and that’s my good deed for 2009.  So don’t ask me for shit now.

We are now running down to the Mall and we reach another point where it looks like someone might die.  So when you go to get onto the Mall, there are little posts that have a chain running through them all up and down the side of the Mall.  At 5:30 am…it’s still dark and you don’t see that chain.  Bammas were getting hemmed the fuck up.  This one white dude was bitching because people were pushing and he was holding his son.  I didn’t have any sympathy.  Anyone with a child that couldn’t walk on their own had no reason to be out there.  I’m sorry but it was like 20 degrees outside and we still had 5 – 6 more hours.  That’s borderline child abuse.  Anyway, we make it over the chain and we are now running down the middle of the Mall trying to get as close as we can get.  That’s when we realize there are PEOPLE SLEEPING ON THE GROUND.  Now, I’m still trying to figure this one out.  You know that there are going to be around 2 million people coming down to the mall…and you decide you want to curl up on the cold ass ground and sleep?  And it’s not even like they were all in one spot.  No…they were scattered around like they were homeless (I swear a few of them were sleeping in boxes).  So now we have to navigate the maze of people sleeping on the ground like they are in their home (I can’t lie, I stepped on a few people.  I couldn’t see them).  Somehow we make it down to the fence which was as close as you could get without having a ticket.  We notice that to the left of the Jumbotron there’s virtually no one there and so that’s where we post up.  If you see a picture of the mall from that day, the first Jumbotron on the right is where we were.  It looks far away from the air, but as you can see from this picture…not bad.

So it’s now about 6 am and that’s when we realize that we still have 6 more hours to go. That’s when the cold started to set in and we started to lose people.  I’ll post what happened next at a later date.

So incase you didn’t know, I was at the inauguration yesterday.  That’s why there’s no new Insanity Check yet.  We were supposed to record last night but everyone was too exhausted.  We’ll be recording on Thursday and I’ll be doing a full post on my time downtown yesterday but for now, I want to address something.  I watched this video from MSNBC about Bush getting booed at the inauguration when he was introduced.  You can hear Chris Mathews say “Don’t do that.  Have some class.”  Well, to Chris and anyone else who feels that way, I have to respectfully say…Go fuck yourself.  First off, the booing and chants of “na na na na hey hey hey Good bye” were the conservative chants.  Down in the mix you saw people giving the jumbotrons the finger and shouting “Fuck Bush.”  And why not?  This is a man who lead a party that did everything it could over the last 8 years to divide and trivialize this country.  When we spoke out against the war we were called unpatriotic.  Some idiots tried to renamed French Fries to Freedom Fries.  When a massive storm stranded our brothers and sisters and the federal government responded horribly (we get aid to other countries faster and more effectively) we were told that they did the best they could.  We were lied to about Iraq. We’ve seen our soldiers sent to war without proper equipment and then brought home to horrible medical car.  President Obama now has to deal with 2 Wars and a crumbling economy (the DOW dropped 300 points yesterday and is now under 8k) so yes, Booooooooo to Bush.  He has one of the worse approval ratings ever.  What did you think was going to happen at an emotional event like this?  I find it hilarious that the media spent the last 2 – 3 years telling us how bad Bush was and then now act surprised that the people on a day like this would react in such a way.  What happened yesterday was the raw emotion and will of the people.  Obama has asked that while we remember the past, we look forward to the future.  I agree.  But yesterday was the first time the people (myself included) could vocalize directly to George W. Bush how we felt about him and we did.  Now that he is officially out of the office, we can move forward.  I don’t care about prosecuting him or members of his Administration.  I won’t be protesting outside of his home.  Me and 2 – 3 million other people vocalized our dissent on the 20^th and that’s good enough for me.  Don’t criticize us for speaking out minds and going with the gut, emotional reaction that many of the American people have but the media has tried to downplay.

Where were you when history was made November 4th 2008?  For those who lived to see the first black President of the United States, I don’t think any of us will forget where we were at 11:00 pm November 4th.  It’ll make for a great story to tell our kids when we grow up.  For us at the Insanity Report it’s especially special because we were recording our live Election night show.  It was a great night.  Ryce made tacos, we had beer and alcohol and we recorded as history was being made.  We discussed the results as they came in, as well as many other topics.

Some things we discussed:

1. Top Ten Things to Expect from an Obama-Biden Administration
2. What States we weren’t going to visit after the election
3. Our experiences standing in line and voting
4. Slots in Maryland
5. Pervert Judges
6. What we need to change in America to fix our voting system
7. Palin getting pranked

And many other things

PRESIDENT ELECT BARACK OBAMA.  That sounds great.  It’s crazy that not only did Barack Obama win the election but he did it in a blow out.  I’m sitting here and the count right now is 338 to 156 for Obama.  I can’t even really express how it feels to see this right now.  But it does feel good.  The first black President of the United States of America.  Now I’ll be honest, January 21, 2009, I’ll be Obama biggest critic.  But right now, I’m just going to soak up the fact that this man won.  It’s been a long 21 months.  But the freshman senator from Illinois has taken down the Clinton machine and the republican machine to become the 44th President of the United States of America.  I’ll have more to post later this week.  But right now, I’m just going to post this and enjoy the picture I have with it.

August 28, 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King jr. gave his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech.  45 years latter on the same exact day Senator Barack Obama officially accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America.  In doing so Senator Obama gave what is probably his best speech to date at Invesco Field Stadium in front of 84,000 people and 38 million watching in their living rooms at home.  As I sat on my couch and watched the speech and saw the range of people in the crowd, that’s when it hit me that I was watching this generation’s version of Dr. King.

Now I know some people, especially older African Americans will be offended by me saying that.  But hear me out.  Saying that Barack Obama is this generation’s MLK isn’t by any means saying that Obama has surpassed King.  No, Obama hasn’t been arrested, beaten, had dogs or fire hoses turned on him.  But think about this.  Who else can my generation look to for inspiration?  Actors, rappers, athletes?  Even the older generation, when they looked up to celebrities they had people breaking the barriers like Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, etc.  Who do we have?  Lil Wayne, Jay-Z and Mike Vick?  No, Barack Obama represents the first real pillar of African American pride that has transcended race for our generation.  Sure there have been other positive Black role models and figures.  But has anyone really reached the jaw dropping, awe inspiring levels that Senator Obama did last Thursday night?  Even beyond that historic night.  Has there ever been a greater recent moment for the black family , which so many people say is dead, than when Michelle Obama and Sasha and Milia talked to Senator Obama via satellite last Monday?   The Obama family not only represents the American dream but they shatter every stereotype that permeates the African American community.  First African American President of the Harvard Law Review, taught Constitutional Law, served as a community organizer, married an African American woman (also a lawyer), had two beautiful daughters, served as an Illinois State Senator, gave a very impressive Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, currently serves as a U.S. Senator and after running a spectacular primary campaign beat out Hillary Clinton to become the 2008 Democratic candidate for President.  Now I see why republicans hate him so much and why they are trying to push Sarah Palin so much.  They wish Obama was one of them.