Senators orate bio-partisan words of welcome. A cleric gives an invocation calling on an Almighty to bring care, hope, and peace to the nation. Lady Gaga, a classically trained Pop singer renders the National Anthem in a fashion that sets the bar high for any who follow. A black-robed Latina Justice of the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, administers an oath to a Black-East Asian who becomes our first woman Vice President; the band plays Hail Columbia, the Vice President’s song. The Chief Justice asks Joe Biden to swear that he will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does. He is proclaimed the 46th President. The usual ruffles and flourishes precede Hail to the Chief, the President’s song. The usual speech calling for change and unity follows. The President vows to be the president of all the people. It is short, effective, inspiring, and appropriate. All that is left is for the usual poem to be read, and the Benediction. The crowd that includes three former presidents can then disperse and go about their day. But wait, something isn’t going as planned.
So it was a few days before in Washington DC, when unruly mobs grew to a seditious insurrection and stormed our Temple of Democracy. These were people who disavow democratic principles, people who do not want a country committed to people of all colors and cultures; by those who celebrate the Holocaust, by those who buy into Q’s conspiracy theories, by those who do not want to believe that all men are created equal.
Fifty-six years earlier, at the other end of the National Mall, the Reverend Martin Luther King told us he had had a dream, “that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” We are still toiling to make this Union more perfect. We were reminded!
President Biden has his hands full for the next few years. He has to demonstrate that his administration can end the pandemic that haunts us and kills thousands each day. He must get the country back to work and the kids back in school. He must provide economic aid to the millions unemployed through no fault of their own, standing in long lines for free food to feed their families. He must revive the manufacturing sector of the economy; he must convince the world that we are a nation that keeps its word, its alliances, its treaties, and that we are a people that can be judged by the content of its character[ii]. He has a hard row to hoe.
Biden calls for unity. The ultra-conservative cable news accuses him, on the first day in office, of installing far-left programs that cause disunity. His party’s progressive wing in Congress sees him as too moderate, a middle-of-the-roader. Yet unity is what our people need, some effort to meet in the middle, to do right for today, to work toward the never achievable perfect union, but try to make it better today than yesterday. Perhaps good, effective, and efficient government, conducted by experienced and competent people can bring changes to still the conspiratorial hoards. We will always have a diversity of views; that makes us a great nation. Diversity of ideas, however, is to be argued on the floors of Congress, not in the streets and not through armed insurrection.
We wish Biden well, for the sake of the country. We hope the calling of Amanda Gorman sustains itself to help us take stock of ourselves and strive to excite the soul of the nation to meet the expectations of its creed.
