At critical mass, D.C. crowd struggles for a glimpse of history

Kate Breslin

I’m not sure if the mainstream media has jumped onto the bandwagon of calling it “Purplegate,” but that’s what we call it. And by “we,” I mean the five people I went to the Inauguration with and the thousands of others who were waiting in the cold with us to see our first Community Organizer become President.

I work as an organizer for the 5th Congressional District of Connecticut. I know what it’s like and what it takes to run a winning campaign. Two of my former roommates decided to take a change in lifestyle, quit their jobs and jump onto the Obama bandwagon to make history. As a result, we saw Barack Obama become our 44th President and my two friends got tickets to witness the Inauguration in person. I just happened to be lucky enough to get one of theirs.

As exciting and amazing an adventure as it was, it’s hard to say that it was worthwhile. I took off a day of work to drive to D.C. It would be about this time to go into how arduous and painful the journey down was. But it wasn’t. My friend and I didn’t have a plan. We just got into the car, drove to D.C. and reunited with our long lost organizer roommate to live it up at the inauguration.

We got up at the crack of dawn on Inauguration Day to drive into the city. The streets were empty. We thought we were golden and that we would have the best damn seats in the purple section.

At 6 a.m. we jumped out of the car and descended into a mass of people. We had to forfeit getting food on our way in because a group of Obama staffers we were supposed to join told us to ditch that plan and get into line as fast as humanly possible. We never did find them.

When we got to the purple area, it was impossible to tell where the line was, much less where the end of it was. It was utter chaos. Other than big purple signs with arrows pointing in ambiguous directions, there was nothing to indicate where the line started, where it was going and where it ended. The one cop we did find told us to “go over there, in between the two buildings. Figure out which part is the end.”

One would assume there would be an inordinate number of police in the capital on Inauguration Day, right? I figured it would look like the occupied city it once did back in 2003. No. The only indications of the presence of security were the snipers and anti-aircraft weapons on top of the surrounding buildings.

We stood in a crowd in between two buildings, unmoving, for three hours. Most of the people we were with at that time didn’t have tickets and were getting grumpy. At that point, the only highlight was getting to see Jesse Jackson’s hat float by (I’m not very tall) and a glimpse of the Reverend Al Sharpton.

We eventually made the decision to find the real line and made it closer to the gates. But, there was still no movement. A woman behind me was sobbing with her husband as she called MSNBC repeatedly to report what was happening. She tried, in vain, every thing she could think of to get some indication that people were paying attention to this. She had been in line since 4:30 in the morning. They gave up and went home at 11 a.m. Another couple had traveled from Denver and had been in line since 5 a.m. They too gave up.

It was 11 o’clock and no one was telling us anything. People were giving up. Others were panicking. So many people had traveled across the country to witness this historic event. At that point, you couldn’t even hope to watch it on a TV somewhere nearby. The sheer mass of people made it impossible to move. The only hope they had as they left was that they would at least get to see it on YouTube later that night.

When the gates finally opened and they did let people in, people were getting in who didn’t bother to get in line.

Fortunately, we weren’t a violent bunch. Instead of rushing the gates, we chanted “PURPLE,” “Let us in! Let us in!” and sang a variety of tunes. A variety of individuals climbed trees, ambulances and trucks to rile the crowd and to get the PIC to pay attention to us. We could have incited a riot. They slowly started to let in small groups of people two to four at a time. We did the math. If there were really 80,000 people waiting to get in (and this was just our section), we would be just in time for the next two inaugurations. So, this was how campaign staff was going to be treated.

My friends and I were a lucky bunch. We were some of the last people let into a mostly empty viewing location. We got through the gates at 11:55. Cold and numb. But we got in!

And we thought we were golden again. We sprinted into the lawn area. Trees blocked the Jumbotron screens that the Inaugural Committee set up for us to watch. We couldn’t get around them because of the porta-potties. None of the speakers were in synch and Obama echoed through the mall. I sort of heard Yo-Yo Ma perform and I got bits and pieces of Obama’s speech.

When Obama finished speaking, we decided to high-tail it out of there for safety and sanity. We were of the lucky few in the Purple Gate to actually witness... something. But that didn’t mean there weren’t lots of other people with the same idea to leave just then.

And that’s when the full scale of it all became a reality. We were surrounded by millions of people. There was just a sea of bobbing heads moving with no direction. We went in the exact opposite direction of the sea and crammed six people into a cab.

The very lack of crowd control, cops, and organization made me severely skeptical of any future successful attempts to organize organizers. It sucked. It was cold. It was long. But the optimism and solidarity of the crowd I was with made it the most worthwhile adventure I’ve been on in a long time.

I almost got trampled, I almost got frostbite, and I almost heard Obama speak.

I can say I survived Purplegate 2009.