January 20th

I have already put a photo with the same motif as this one.The motif is "returning to where I was."

I was born in New York 27 years ago and living there for about four years. While my family and I were living in N.Y., we visited Washington D.C. twice and went to most of the touristy places in D.C. Last year, I was staying Alexandria, Virginia, which is placed right across the Potomac River from the capital of the United States.

It was three weeks before I get back to Japan this time, when I came back to Lincoln Memorial in Memorial Parks. Just as I'd expected, there was nothing changed at all. Well, I didn't remember even I'd visited there more than 20 years ago, so it was just my imagination from the picture. I knew there were still the same seams which my mom once stepped on with her boots, there were the same columns which we all leaned against, and there was the exactly same statued man sitting in the back. His name is Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States.

From Lincoln Memorial, the Capital and Washington Monument

I probably saw the same view that I must have seen when I was a little child, and I dare to say now there is an another guy who seems to see the similar scene as I did--- the incoming 44th President Barack Obama. He is delivering his historic first-African American inaugural speech at Capital Building, a mile straight far from Lincoln Memorial, tomorrow. However, his view is going to have to be much more special than mine, because he should always keeps in his mind the other man who also stood and spoke to the nation at Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from Lincoln Memorial , African American people still had a hard time with segregation. It's hard to believe but the speech was given just 45 years ago from now. I remember, when Barack Obama was elected, there were many pictures of the African American elderly crying on newspapers. They might have seen or heard King's speech for real. Having an African American president surely is the biggest winning in the American civil rights movement which King led before he was assassinated.

Barack Obama's historic Inauguration is being held just one day after the annual celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. This drives me to think of a mysterious fatality of these two great people.

OLYMPUS E-410

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning
of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and
the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood."