On Inauguration Day

So the nightmare we’ve been forced to endure these last four years is finally over. We made it! Of course, 400,000 plus didn’t make it. A bunch of other people fared much worse than us in that time. Still, the vast majority of us came through it relatively untouched. I realize that “relatively” is a relative word(how meta!), and we have all had to deal with something horrible from this administration’s time in power. Besides the pain in the economic and civil rights areas, many of us now have PTSD, and our faith in the system and the rest of humankind is shaken. It seems like the country is a mess and our democracy in tatters, and it feels like we will never be the same again. We won’t be, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The last four years has made us stronger. It has tempered us like steel. It has shown us the areas we need to work on, and the pitfalls to avoid. It has taught us where we need to put safeguards so this never happens again. Everything is a gift you can use to learn and grow, if you teach yourself how to view it properly.
We learned that one third of an entire third of this country’s population is irredeemable. The rest of that third is no cakewalk either, but it is manageable. We also learned that the worst people will out themselves eventually. They cannot hide who they are, and while we were happy to let them hide and ignore the fact that they existed for decades until Trump’s rhetoric called to them like a siren song, we don’t want them to go back into the shadows. We want them to expose who they really are, so we can neuter them. So we can shame them. We should want to do better than that, we should want to deprogram and reteach them. Some people you can’t reach, that’s a fact, so those people must be held accountable and shown that they can’t be a part of society if they can’t figure it out.
The horror of the last four years, and especially the last few weeks has taught us how fragile our democracy is in some areas. It was one last parting gift to make sure we noticed all the stuff we were witness to during this regime. What we do with all that information and warnings is up to us, but I believe it will get better. I believe that enough people have seen the truth of where we stand as a nation and just how bad things are in certain areas. Because of this whole fiasco, a whole bunch of people are now motivated to get involved and fix our country. The next generation of leaders has already formed, filled with righteous anger and determination forged in the crucible of one of the darkest periods this nation has ever navigated. We are all so much stronger now.
Which is a good thing, because the fight isn’t over yet. We have taken the hill though, and we are fighting from the high ground. I know that it’s hard to feel confident and in control after four years of abuse and mayhem, but the battle’s tide has turned. Don’t let them gaslight you into thinking you have no power. We have the power now, and we must use it to transform the country. We can’t think small, we can’t convince ourselves that we should be happy for breadcrumbs. We should demand everything we can dream of, and not look back. We should crush the things that have held us back for so long, and we should learn to believe in that utopia we can envision. You know the one, where people get fair treatment and corruption is not tolerated. Where there is equality in all forms, and people who work themselves to death have something to show for it, and all the money doesn’t go to a privileged few. We should have healthcare and living wages and quality education. We should eliminate systemic racism and get religious dogma out of government. There are a million things we can improve on, because that’s what this country has been doing from the start. America didn’t just become America when some revolutionaries drew up a declaration and a constitution. That was the birth of an idea; a vision of what America could be.
We’ve been working on fulfilling that dream ever since, and we still have a lot of work to do. You’re a part of that. You’ve done a lot of the really hard part already. After four years of playing defense and laying low, now it’s time to go on the defensive and sweep down across the battlefield. Now is the time to act on everything we’ve been preparing ourselves for all these years. Now it’s time to show what true patriots can accomplish, not by rioting and spewing hatred, but by using the powers of government and the rights afforded us to peacefully demand a change.
So now I’m going to go watch an inauguration for the first time in my life and bask in the normalcy of a functioning government and the decency of a man who will actually care about the country again.