Today's the day... look out below.

The economy is still failing. The price of a barrel of oil is $34 on the stock market. Moral is low. But, lo! A new captain now comes to take hold of the ship. It should be a day of celebration and reverie and majesty. This doesn't happen every day.

But, there's this nagging feeling. Talk on Rachel Maddow's inaugural watch talked about a criminal investigation of war crimes against now former president George W. Bush. However serious, one has to wonder what the implications of this might be. What would the world see? Would this make our leaders feel more responsible?

A worry that cropped up was about the mythical land of Gitmo... where P.R. escapades showed reporters the sunnier side of a camp that could possibly be called the torture satellite outside the states. A reporter from Michigan Radio discussed the possibilities of President Obama shutting down the internment camp. This would seem ideal and what the general public of the states has been asking for, but the reporter noted that the story would be buried. What would happen to the prisoners who were on hunger strikes? Who would really know what exactly had gone on there?

When gitmo closes (to the press, to the residents/prisoners, to the thoughts of Americans), so does the truth, the woman reporter asserted. [She was the gitmo correspondent for the Miami Herald.]

On a more personal level, a friend of mine had a conversation with me about this shadowy government tentacle that moves under a watchful eye of some leaders that we may or may not know about.
"I think the last great president was John Kennedy. He talked about these agencies as arms of a a massive entity. And look where that got him."

This could just be another hippie's conspiracy, but then he said something that made me wonder, worrying about the future.

"I think I don't know what's worse: the possibility that Obama works against these entities to make real change and he gets assassinated; or he lives on because he's only another puppet for this giant machine just like all the other presidents and leaders before him."

Do we as a nation expect our new leader (a man of change, a new icon of the younger generation) to die in some horrible attempt? Are we as a people so fatalistic that we actually think this is possible?

I worry they do.

What will the next four years bring? What challenges will this new president face? How will he be different from the Obama that campaigned? How will America change?

Take a deep breath, America.
It's all about to start.