Let’s say your neighbour is a handy person, prone to late-night hammering sessions and early morning construction projects. In the beginning you try to get used to the new soundtrack to your life, the incessant stabs and rhythmic thuds, because how long could it possibly go on? A week? A month? You’ll be fine! You are wrong. Half a year later and you wake up wanting want to peel the neighbour’s eyelids off like an eggshell because the noise is getting worse. What was a small room remodel has turned into large blasts of dynamite blowing massive chunks into the very foundation of the street. Still, you can’t do anything about it. So a year on, your brain has reorganized its synapses to treat the never-ending hammering as ambient sound – just another passing car on the freeway just outside of your sanity.
But one day, one mythic, magical day, you wake up to an unfamiliar serenity. The room looks the same - the pictures slightly tilted on the walls, the carpet the same faded grey, your bedside still a slithering mass of wires - but something is different. It takes you a minute to realize that the strange feeling at the base of your skull is peace and quiet. The noise has gone. The house is still. You can think.
President Trump serves McDonalds at the White House
Surviving the last four years has often felt like having an ear-piece embedded in your skull that blasted out nothing but Trump tweets, viral panic and a vague sense of doom. Day before yesterday a new president was sworn in to run America, and it was as if the world took a giant Xanax-laced laxative.
I have never been happier to see an old straight white man take power, particularly since his first day in office started with a Lady Gaga/J.Lo concert and ended with striking down the Muslim travel ban, stopping the fictional wall against Mexico, reaffirming LGBT protections and rejoining the Paris Accord along with a host of other edicts
I have never been happier to see an old straight white man take power, particularly since his first day in office started with a Lady Gaga/J.Lo concert and ended with striking down the Muslim travel ban, stopping the fictional wall against Mexico, reaffirming LGBT protections and rejoining the Paris Accord along with a host of other edicts. That most of the things Biden tackled on his first day were the brainchild of the child brain of Donald, we sometimes forget that four years ago many things were accepted logic. Don’t, for instance, try to kill poor people. Do listen to scientists when it comes to global health. Don’t serve McDonalds at state dinners.
It’s simple stuff really but indicative of how far collective consciousness has slid in the last several years. Like you, I watched news snippets of Biden’s momentous inauguration with a palpable sense of relief. A woman is the vice president for the first time in history. A black, desi woman. A gay man is a federal secretary of transport, another the spokesperson for the state department. Empathy, tolerance and intelligence have taken the place of hate, bigotry and fear. Biden’s opening act, like dozens of other choices and photo-ops since the election result, were specifically meant to heal the wounds a fascistic presidency left on America and the world.
Like a near death experience or deep illness can sometimes give us a host lived sense of clarity, so, too, do I hope that the reality we all glimpsed these past four years - and 2020 in particular - won’t be dismissed as an aberration which is now defeated
Trump supporters have vowed that 'this isn't over'
But as I watched Biden and Harris being sworn in, my joy was tempered by memory. It’ll take much more than Gaga and a young poet laureate to make me forget the past presidency. Even as I reveled at the symbols of sanity peppered through the day (#MichelleObama), I’m terrified the Americana will rush to paper over the cracks in their republic with a well-choreographed show. We have been in places like this before, where America tries to reinvent herself quick enough that she doesn’t have to answer for the sins of the old.
If anytthing, it is preciselly because Trump was so unvarnished in his cruelty that the truth of America - not the one in politicians speeches and hallmark movies, but the real violence of a racist, xenophobic, scared white supremacist super power - became painfully, irrevocably apparent.
Lady Gaga at President Biden's inauguration
Like a near death experience or deep illness can sometimes give us a host lived sense of clarity, so, too, do I hope that the reality we all glimpsed these past four years - and 2020 in particular - won’t be dismissed as an aberration which is now defeated. Despite all he did, despite all he said, despite all he killed, Trump still got 77 million votes.
77 million people who believed in the worst of themselves isn’t an aberration; it’s a time bomb.
