New Year, Same Old, 20 & 21. A New Beginning.

Yesterday was a happy day. Finally, the orange man left the White House, and power went to the person who had been chosen by the majority of people to govern them. I watched some of the Inauguration online, and let my English students watch. If there hadn't been a pandemic, it would have been on a par with the first Inauguration of Barack Obama. 

What a stark contrast to four years ago! Two women singers, one of whom called out part of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, one famous country singer, a young Black poet laureate, and the swearing in of the first woman Vice-President by a woman Justice of the Supreme Court. It was so good to listen to the President call out for unity, It was so good to hear the President speak in full, intelligent sentences. It was so good to hear a President talk to everybody instead of simply his sycophants. The four years of obstruction, of stoking hatreds, of using the public as if it were the private, are over.

But it's not over. The forces that put Trump in there in the first place, and that stormed the Capitol two weeks ago, hoping to keep him there, haven't gone away in a magic puff of smoke. There is still too much to be done. Education is necessary, but it will only dampen them, never eliminate them. Those forces, of hatred, fear, egoism, and greed, are too firmly rooted in human existence. They can be made less, but they can never be eradicated. 

But they can be ostracized. They can be brought into the light and ridiculed until the daylight of reason and education shrivels them to insignificant scraps. The country was well on the way to doing so until the neo-conservatives of the Reagan era began to feed the force of greed, which, in turn, fed the forces of egoism, fear, and hatred. They have been growing in a permissive atmosphere, and have brought us to this point, where a President who embodied those forces tried to give them sway over all. 

We can fight them back. It won't be easy, because an entire generation has grown thinking they are entitled and no one else is. That entitlement might be based on many factors, but they are always exclusionary. They can be skin, bank account, or the spot on earth one was born. We have to re-educate ourselves, and our children, that those factors don't matter. The only thing that matters is that we are all born, live here, and then will die. That, while we live here on this rock, we should help others along the same journey.

Therefore, President Biden's call for unity is a call to join and help one another along life. It is a slam in the face of all that tears us apart. What we have to do now, no matter where we are, nor what our nationality, is follow it. We must help each other, and see ourselves in others' eyes. 

Here's to four years of pushing forward. It won't be easy, and there will be moments when it will seem we are sliding back or not moving forward fast enough. But, at least we will be trying, and the factors that have threatened to rend our world will be pushed back into the twilght of history.

Life continues.