January 20, 2021

January 20, 2021

It is finished. Joe Biden is now our president.

I breathe a sigh of relief. And it all seems a bit anticlimactic this evening. I’m not torn up with anxiety over what will be. It is finished.

I have been making mom buy canned food for weeks, in anticipation of the civil war I was certain would begin on this day.

“I could be so wrong. I could be so wrong,” I said. “But we’ll be able to eat the food.”

“It’s OK. I think we need to do it,” she responded.

I was so wrong. Thank God. I was so wrong.

I’ve been thinking back on ending the friendship with H., when she continued to support Trump after the riot.

“I support his policies but not his rhetoric,” she said.

That was it for me. I’ve questioned if I did the right thing. Over and over, I’ve questioned it. She was a best friend. A long term friend. We knew each other through and through. We knew where all the bodies were buried. But when I revisit that decision, always the assurance comes I did the right thing.

I read an article today and felt wholly validated:

“Since January 6, I have read and watched and listened as conservatives I admire have tried, unsuccessfully in my view, to argue that the Trump administration’s accomplishments—the Abraham Accords, the judicial appointments, the economic revival, the vaccines—stood as their own realities apart from Trump’s character as president, as if it were possible to divide the bone of policy from the marrow of moral realities. But this is political gnosticism, a separation of character, cognition, and belief from human action—as if a democratic nation could tolerate, and indeed prosper under, a Neronian figure like Trump as long as the “engine” of policy pulled us along. The shiny objects are sufficient, the argument goes, even if the destructive character happens, for the moment, to accompany them.”

It’s not good enough to say you support his policies but not his rhetoric. His rhetoric was his policy. His policy was to sow strife and division. His policy was white supremacy. There is no good in him. None.

It is finished. Joe Biden is now our president.