My Inauguration Experience (or, The Most Poorly-Organized Event in History)

Let me tell you a little about the Hell we went through today at the Inauguration... and as you'll see from the links below, I was one of the lucky ones, no thanks to this damn government's complete incompetence at every level.

We thought that standing in line for 150 minutes outside the Cannon House Office Building (where we were picking up some of our Inauguration tickets) on Monday would be a sufficient appetizer for the enormity of the unavoidable crowd chaos on Tuesday, but we were so, so wrong. The way the tickets were divvied up was by color-coded section. There was a purple section, a yellow section, an orange section, a blue section, and a silver section. There may have been one or two other colors that I'm not remembering. Our five tickets originally consisted of two purples and three silvers. Purple was much better than silver, so we thought that we might be able to somehow trade up to five purples, or failing that, trade down to five silvers. We ended up doing the latter, trading the two purples in exchange for two silvers and some cash, which significantly helped offset our trip costs. Trading away the better tickets turned out to be a really lucky break.

Getting to and attending the ceremony really wasn't all that bad. Not great, but not terrible, at least for us. This morning, we left at 6am, knowing that people would start lining up at 4am, but being unwilling to wake up at 3:30 after being out until 1:30 at the South Carolina Ball at the Air and Space Museum. As expected, it took quite a bit longer than normal to make the 1.5 mile walk from our apartment on Massacheusetts & 13th to Capitol Hill, because of all of the random road closures. They'd changed many of the gate entrances without notice 48 hours prior, so there was a lot of confusion there - an indication of the negligence to come later in the day.

The 35 minute walk took about 70 minutes, and the foot traffic increased geometrically as we approached the Capitol. We hit a wall of people about 1/4 mile from the Silver entrance gate. After another 90 minutes of standing around waiting, the gate opened, and the soldiers inexplicably let randomly sized clumps of people in to to the security line at random intervals, to no apparent effect. The crowd (the tightest mob I'd ever been in up until that morning) was getting angry, and reasonably so, from looking at relatively empty security checkpoints and not being allowed to enter.

After another 45 minutes of being crushed in the mob outside the gate, we finally got to go through the security checkpoint, which was a joke. They just had you flash your ticket, open your coat, and waved you through. Security theatre, if you ask me - even more useless than the airport. At least it was fast. Then we hit mob #2: inside the Mall.

As with outside the event venue, there was absolutely no traffic direction inside the Mall either. Actually, at one point, we did get stopped to wait 10 minutes for a single police motorcycle to drive by. We picked out a spot in the Silver section that we thought would work, then saw some people flowing forward beyond the Silver section: the mob had overrrun the plastic temporary fencing cordoning off the sections, so we took the opportunity to get 600 feet closer.

So far, so good: a little irritating, but not too bad considering that there were 2 million people there.

The ceremony itself was really good: Some great performances, a fantastic speech, and John Roberts even flubbed the Oath of Office. Getting out, though, was to be a truly awful experience.

We watched the ceremony from in front of the Capitol reflecting pool, closer to the Northern side of the Mall than the Southern.


Unfortunately, because they closed Constitution Ave. for the parade later in the day, the only way we could exit was about a half mile backward and to the South - and then it got really bad. You can follow our eventual route here: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2505093

We exited the Mall at 4th and Independence and immediately started looking for a place to cross the Mall back North to head home, but the police/secret service completely closed both Constituion Ave and Pennsylvania Ave. We heard that the Eastern route that we used to arrive at the event was closed, so we headed West, expecting to be able to get across the Mall *somewhere*. At every major intersection, we asked the soldiers/volunteers/police/etc if we could cross over there. They said "no." "Do you know where we could?" "No clue. We thought 14th street would be open, but it looks like they closed that too."

There was no communication between any of the "authorities" at this event - NONE. No one knew anything. There were no directions, no signage, no information whatsoever.

We walked West on Independence Ave. along with a few hundred thousand others, and hit a major logjam at just about every intersection. We had to literally force ourselves through HARD - it was like the Taste of Chicago, but many times more dense. None of us have even been so squished or crushed in our lives. You couldn't even move your arms for many minutes at a time - and this was while "walking" home.

At 12th and International, we hit a particularly bad logjam. No one was moving anywhere. We tried to ford through as with the previous jams, but ended up getting nowhere. Rachel's custom-made "Llamas for Obama" hat was stolen right off her head. Asking the police anything turned out to be a huge mistake, because they actually didn't want us to move anywhere, at all - just stand there. As it turned out, the city transportation authority decided to close the Smithsonian Metro (subway) station there at the last minute, and the crowd was PISSED, because there wasn't really anywhere else to go, since they'd closed off the Mall, and the closest subway stops were pretty far away. We learned after getting home that 200 National Guard troops had to be called in minutes after we made it out to prevent a riot. Frankly, these idiots deserved a riot for creating this mess.

The only way we got through this throng was by Rachel lying to the police that she lost her father somewhere in the crowd and had to find him.

We broke out of the mob, took the path of least resistance down 12th, and made our way to 14th via C street - our next hope of crossing over.

No hope. We'd been walking for quite a while now, (on top of standing for hours at the event and before) and were sore to say the least.

Then 15th street - also no. We asked the Army guys if we could cross. "No." "Know where we can?" "No idea. You could try heading back East." No way.

The military guys were really nice, but it was at this point that Iraq and Katrina really started to make sense: These people can't coordinate. There was no radio contact, between anyone, because no one had radios. This wasn't the grunts' fault, it was whoever was in charge, who was apparently no one.

Walking further to 17th street, it looked like we finally had a chance to cross over. Actually, 17th was technically closed too, but everyone was so fed up that we just walked through every unprotected space we could to get somewhere. Blockade after blockade, we finally found ourselves slowing to a stop at 19th and E.

More army guys just stopped everyone cold for no apparent reason. We saw other people walking ahead of us in all directions, but we had to stand there for some reason, with no explanation. After about 10 minutes of pointless waiting, an enormous caravan of empty tour buses start rolling through very, very slowly. Whenever there was a break in the line (meaning a several-minute long gap between the buses) we tried to cross, but they wouldn't let us - we stood there looking at an empty street with the Army blocking our path. The mob of several thousand started yelling, chanting, anything to express that we were REALLY tired of this, and the buses weren't moving anyway.

Then the Army told us to turn around and keep heading West to 20th/21st. NO. We were screaming at them, ready to push them over. Finally, they just gave up and let us through, and we had our first indication of hopeful progress in the general direction of our apartment. It had been hours since we could feel our toes, fingers, noses or legs, our feet were screaming to stop, we were incredibly dehydrated, but all we wanted was to end this ordeal. The empty tour buses, incidentally, turned out to be the tour buses for the bands in the parade, just repositioning somewhere else. Vitally important.

45 minutes later, we finally made it back. The trip which under far-from-ideal conditions would have taken 35 minutes total ended up being around 3.5 hours.

Reading the news after we got back, we learned that it had been far worse for others. Thousands of Purple and Blue ticket holders (the tickets we sold/trade for the lesser Silvers) got stuck in a tunnel for hours, and missed the event completely. They traveled from all over the country at great expense to witness this historical moment, and they got stuck in a tunnel because the "authorities" never opened up one of the Purple gates. At least we got to see it. We were close enough to see Obama and the rest out on the stage, and really feel the majesty of the show and occasion. The Purple people had to sit in a blocked tunnel and miss the whole thing.

So here's the lesson: The government cannot organize anything. Having been through this ordeal today, it makes sense that if they can't even do Rose Bowl-level crowd control (Pasadena has done it every year for decades) then stabilizing Iraq and responding to Hurricane Katrina were completely beyond their abilities. The fact that they "organized" an event in their own back yard by cutting the city in half and not allowing crowds to cross from one half to another demonstrates that they're completely incompetent, and can't handle anything beyond setting up meaningless security checkpoints.

Below are some links to other people's ordeals - it's enough to make you see red.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/01/scenes-from-t-2.html

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20090120/NEWS01/901209974&news01ad=1

Purple tunnel of doom:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/01/crush_of_humanity_ii.php

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/01/20/the_tunnel

http://www.facebook.com/wall.php?id=61444130820