One Inaugural Today Richard Blanco is the son of two immigrants from Cuba: he grew up in a Cuban cohort in Miami, Florida. It was instilled in him at a young age that his ancestry and America were one in the same. They were both magical. His foreign home was talked about often, never condemned, while America was their physical home and their place to earn a better life than their previous one could afford them. Blanco’s poem, “One Today,” exhibits his cultural pride, optimism, and gratitude for life and his country: The United States. Blanco crafted his work in such a way that maneuvering from the inside out reflects the clearest picture of what I believe he was trying to say. We are all “one”: we can create subgroups and caste
Sometimes we forget we live in the land of freedom, and unfortunately, we are reminded to be grateful in tragic ways. Blanco’s positive outlook on life and our country is reinforced by mentioning the tragedies we have undergone, “the empty desks of twenty children” is a memorial of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary. It reminds us that genocide is everywhere in the world. And yes even though, sometimes, bad things happen, we must try and strive to prevent them in the future. We are one not only as a country but as a race: we are the only human race. When incidents like that in Connecticut occur, we should band together and help each other— and because we are a land of immigrants when tragedy strikes home, it influences the whole world. Not only do we need to remember the pain, but we must also build from it. Blanco’s repetition of “work” lends itself to the “last floor on the Freedom Tower” (line 53). The work of an American is never through, as shown by Blanco’s use of diction in how to describe our people “resilien[t]” (line 54); our ability to mourn and still progress