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Examiner Neighborhood Inaugural Ball for Metro Atlanta
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Examiners from major cities across the country participated in Neighborhood Balls on Inauguration Day. Below is one Examiner's experience:
"Hope is more potent than bullets."
With those words, Cyril Hanna, a young Christian immigrant from Alexandria, Egypt, explained why his family moved to the United States when he was a child, and why he chose to vote for Barack Obama for president.
Hanna spoke to a group of about 200 at a hotel in Marietta, Georgia, Tuesday night as part of the national celebration of the inauguration of the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Richard Pellegrino, the event organizer, said he decided to host the event because "on election night, I couldn't leave my chair. I had tears running down my face." After today's events in Washington, DC, he said, "everybody now believes."
Party like it's 1995! Obama revelers in Georgia relive
the Clinton days with the Macarena. (PBG)
The diverse crowd at the Crowne Plaza Hotel watched tribute videos and danced the Macarena like it was 1995, the heady days of the Clinton years, someone suggested.
Renee West, a social studies teacher at Benjamin E. Mays High School in Southwest Atlanta, where she watched Obama's inauguration with the students, called the whole experience "wonderful."
"Long live Obama," she added. West, whose parents took to her to Washington, DC, in August, 1963, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. talk about his dream, declared, "This is Martin's dream come true. People's mindset [on race relations] has changed."
"I feel great," said Mary Cantrell, who came to the party with her two youngest children, ages twelve and fourteen, because she said that they needed to be exposed to more important things. "It's a great day," she said.
Referring to Barack Obama as the personification of "unity," Pellegrino said the new president is the "symbol of the new American," with "innate strength, hope and confidence."
Ms. West, whose son Khaliph watched the inauguration at Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, thought that it was appropriate that he was photographed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution proudly holding up his grandfather's WWII veteran's flag on such a historic day. The whole day had left her "ecstatic."
"I'm floating on air," she said.
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