01/19/2021
This đź‘Ť
After 40 [sic] years in the desert, Inauguration Day 2021 is here. I’ll be watching this historic event as a morality play in three parts:
ONE: At the West Front of the U.S. Capitol stand two people who had the courage to run for office amid a blizzard of lies, knives, and crypto-fascism.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr., grew up in a middle class family. During 40-plus years of public service, he's been shaped by his share of defeat and grief. Kamala D. Harris was born in the U.S. to parents from India and Jamaica. She broke thru barriers of white supremacy, misogyny, and racism to become a “first” in every office she's held for the past 15 years. Neither one of them is perfect—if you want “perfect,” look in the mirror! But both are REAL people: decent, intelligent, experienced, and graceful in good times and bad.
They're here because they were chosen by 51.3% of all votes cast in 2020’s fair and legally vetted election (vs. 46.8% for their opponent). No amount of Twitter-twaddle or Republican revisionism will change that old-fashioned fact. There’s a lot to celebrate here, and we who treasure democracy will do just that.
TWO: In the public spaces outside the Capitol, there are no crowds cheering for democracy. That’s due to a mismanaged pandemic, and to the Jan. 6 insurrection, incited by POTUS and his enablers, and executed by domestic terrorists. Instead of cheering crowds, there are steel barriers, rolls of razor wire, and upwards of 25,000 armed security forces to protect us against violent thugs and assorted lunatics, our fellow citizens.
Every U.S. citizen worth his or her salt should work to help assure that the violence of Jan. 6 never happens again—to our leaders, or people of color, or school children sacrificed to Second Amendment madness. There must be no repeat of the scenario Yeats wrote about in 1919: “Things fall apart; / the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
THREE: Finally, we come to #45 and his entourage skipping the Inauguration to get out of town early. Their insolent pre-Inauguration “farewell” is a snub to the Bidens and to all who care about a peaceful transition of power. It’s a 21-gun salute repeat of the message #45’s spouse wore when she went to the border to express her Trump-branded “care” for children torn from their families by his policies: “I really don’t care, do U?”
#45 is on his way to something worse than being rated as the worst president in U.S. history. History will be merciless to him and his entourage as new evidence of greed, corruption, cruelty, and crime pops up. As these people depart D.C., the most civil words I can muster come from Lady Macbeth: “Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once.”
In 4 years, #45 has achieved only 4 things I’m grateful for: He’s made it hard for his party to claim that they and they alone can fly the “law and order” flag. He’s made it hard for them to say, “We and we alone support the police.” He’s made it hard for them to name Antifa and slander BLM as prime sources of political violence in the U.S. Best of all, he and his goons have proven that white is NOT supreme. No way.
Today we celebrate the wide range of citizens all across the political spectrum who understand what it means to be an American. Some had the guts to run for office. Some turned out to vote despite racist barriers. Some served and protected, even gave their lives, to push back murderous mobs of zealots. Some honored their oaths of office, a novelty in the era of #45.
Together, we gave the U.S.A. another chance to get it right. Today we celebrate—tomorrow we get back to work!
