At the microphone before millions Tuesday, Joseph Lowery was plying the profession that put bread on his table: leading a prayer. But the profession isn’t what put him there.

Being a Methodist minister didn’t make Lowery a piece of history worthy of closing out Barack Obama’s inauguration. Being a citizen did. Being fearless and unrelenting against injustice did.

Lowery was one of the architects of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

That’s when Rosa Parks sat, then armies of citizens like Lowery stood, marched, and presented themselves as aggrieved. The community and the nation paid attention. Tuesday the world witnessed one of the end results.

Obama stood and took the oath. In front of him stood somewhere around 2 million people. Yes, standing without a microphone or a badge or souvenirs to sell. Citizens.

Sure, some were there just to see history. Some were there, however, as a last manifestation of a social statement.

Obama by now is used to gargantuan crowds. One of his messages before this one was, to paraphrase, “Now, stop watching, and do something.”

Coming into this election, we could classify ours as a nation of gawkers, people who like to watch. They’d been conditioned to think that governing is something someone else does, something you contract out — like catering.

It’s something that Americans seemed content to leave to, say, Dick Cheney.

In a nation of specialists — as opposed to citizens — power rests in the guy with the pertinent business card.

One could expect in this atmosphere to get some mileage out of mocking “inner-city organizer” on a candidate’s vitae. What kind of business is that?

Added to these conditions: Americans have had the horrible habit of fixing their attention on celebrities and matters that don’t affect them. Steroids in baseball. Britney in rehab. Nancy Grace has commanded one-24th of one 24-hour news channel talking about one fair-skinned missing girl, and before that another.

But things changed in many ways with this presidential election, in large part because of the dire straits in which the nation found itself.

We saw a surge of first-time and minority voters. We saw the nation’s most massive political grass-roots effort ever. The swell of participation in Texas’ Democratic caucuses became the stuff of legend.

We know that with the Internet, any mutant strain of endeavor can amass an army. With the Obama campaign, however, it facilitated a franchise bequeathed upon us by quill.

Enough thumb-sucking and star-gazing.

Such a note came Tuesday from none so glittering as a humbled Beyonce. After singing to the Obamas at the inaugural ball, she told ABC, “I want to get smarter. I want to be involved.”

Getting involved doesn’t necessarily mean running for office, or taking to the streets in protest, though we can be grateful to those who have done either to help this nation change course.

Involved citizenship takes many forms, from mentoring probationers, to coaching T-ballers, to manning a crosswalk.

But the essence of involved citizenship is being informed — about your neighborhood, your country, your planet.

Said Obama on the Capitol steps: “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character.”

He wasn’t talking about what puts bread on the table or bumps the GDP. He was talking about citizens seizing the opportunity to make their world better, not to make a living but so this enterprise in self-government will live on.

John Young’s column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.