John Lewis surely believes in the orderly transfer of power as a tenet of democracy, but asking him to keep quiet and sit through the inaugural ceremonies this time is asking too much.

Each day the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

His message was that the injustices of the past were not inevitable. But he knew, too, that dreaming was not enough.

Half a century ago, the keynote speaker Martin Luther King took to the Lincoln Memorial to speak truth to power. Today the keynote speaker is a black man who represents power.

Relatively few people know or recall that the Kennedy administration tried to get organizers to call it off; that the FBI tried to dissuade people from coming; that racist senators tried to discredit the leaders.