An excited Richard Fierro didn’t know what he would hear or who he’d spot next as he sat in the gallery of the Capitol on the night of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. Someone nearby was talking about Mar-a-Lago; a Minnesota teacher told him about her work; he met a basketball player who’d been tasered in Milwaukee. Mr Fierro, an Army veteran and Colorado brewery owner, soaked it all in.
“When you’re in the middle of it, in the gallery just watching, everybody’s kind of in one pool, which is the best,” Mr Fierro, 45, tells The Independent after his return home to Colorado Springs. “We’re not split up like Congress is right down the bottom -- and so that’s tense on the bottom ... But when you look at the gallery, everybody’s mixed in and nobody knows who anybody is, until they start talking. That’s what America is about.”
