Obama: Time to act to answer the call of
history
Tuesday January 22, 2013 09:18:50 AM,
Arun Kumar, IANS
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Obama has a second date with history
Barack
Obama has a second date with history Monday as the first
African-American president is sworn in again with all the pomp and
circumstance in a ceremony steeped
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Washington:
Four years after making history as the first African-American
president of the US, Barack Obama Monday renewed his oath for the
next four with a forceful plea to act to "answer the call of
history".
"My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will
seize it - so long as we seize it together," said Obama after
taking the oath just before noon in a spectacular inaugural
ceremony.
"America's possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the
qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and
drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a
gift for reinvention," he said.
An estimated 700,000 flag-waving people crowding the national mall
and millions more at home watched on television as he took the
oath on the steps of US Capitol's West Front, dressed in red,
white and blue, from Chief Justice John Roberts.
Extolling the importance of democracy across the world, Obama
said: "America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every
corner of the globe."
"For no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most
powerful nation," he said outlining the vision for his second term
which formally began at noon Sunday on the constitutionally
mandated date of Jan 20.
Calling for the need to "answer the call of history" in tackling
the debates and problems of the era, Obama said: "You and I, as
citizens, have the power to set this country's course."
"With common effort and common purpose, with passion and
dedication, let us answer the call of history and carry into an
uncertain future that precious light of freedom," he said.
Obama took the oath Monday on two bibles, one which his idol
Abraham Lincoln used for his first inauguration in 1861 and the
other, a "travelling Bible" of legendary American civil rights
leader Martin Luther King Jr, to take the oath a second time in
two days.
Monday's ceremony was steeped in symbolism as the two bibles
represented for the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother
"two people whose shoulders he's standing on" for the
inauguration.
It also carried added symbolic resonance as the second swearing in
of America's first black president came 150 years after Lincoln's
emancipation proclamation and almost 50 years since King's famous
"I have a dream" speech.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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