Inauguration Day was miraculous. President Biden gave one of the best inauguration speeches of our lifetime. This from Chris Wallace of FOX NEWS ! Vice-President Kamala was great. Lady Gaga, Jenifer Lopez, Garth Brooks, great ! BUT I HAD TO SHED TEARS WHEN THAT BEAUTIFUL ” skinny black girl, descendant of slaves,) ” pronounced for millions around the world that “our country was not broken, but merely unfinished”.
I firmly believe every word that Amanda Gorman said, but I will add that we need more than her young optimism and idealism. We need to hold to account the millions who told and believed 30,000 lies for five years, that ended up with an attempt two weeks ago to blow up the democracy that my uncle and 400,000 young men, died to preserve in WWII.
A few nights nights ago, Nancy Pelosi told Joy Reid, quoting MLK on his Holiday,
“Peace is not just the absence of conflict, it is the presence of Justice. “
A writer in the Boston Globe named Megan Kan quoted the Unesco constitution “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. ” Megan Kan is a Doctoral student of Sociology at Harvard, who spent the last month in Florida embedded with a group of Trumpists who espoused every slogan and lie that was paraded through the capitol on Jan.6.
Megan wrote that “Recognizing what the harmful ideas are, where they come from, and why they take hold is how we will begin to construct the best defenses against them. It is through this sort of understanding that we may hopefully begin to dismantle the destructive narrative and construct a new one together.
Know anybody who thinks the election was really stolen from Trump? There are millions of them surrounding you. You have an obligation, an American obligation, a moral obligation, and a personal responsibility to your own integrity, to begin to find the truth “together” with them. If you don’t, then Amanda Gorman was wrong, this country is broken. Anybody for “unfinished” ? Time to do the hard work .