Politics

PT Thread 2: Hope, that feeling America has forgotten.

You’re still holding your breath and cannot believe this day has finally come.

You’re in a mild panic, slowly building towards hyperventilation, imagining something will certainly ruin it, attempt to prevent it from calmly taking place; maybe another try at insurrection, a bomb going off somewhere, someone shooting at those being sworn in, a sudden tsunami drowning Washington, or the start of a civil war.

But the worst that might happen today is for a seditious treasonous mendacious bloated yam-colored conman mob boss to attempt one of his petty tricks and make this day all about him; and he might very well do this without you even noticing it as the fcker has been banned from every social media and site possible. And the better news is that by the time you’ve finished reading this post, he would have left the White House.

Onward!

Today is the day where Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. – lifelong Civil Servant, Senator, two-time Vice President of the United States, decent Human Being born into White Privilege, who profited from it, but also who throughout the decades evolved into becoming one of the most empathetic and uniting public figures of our time – will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States of America.

Today is also the day where Kamala Devi Harris – lifelong Civil Servant, first Black Woman to be elected District Attorney in California, first Woman to be California’s Attorney General, first Indian-American Senator, first Black Woman and first Asian American to be picked as vice-presidential running mate on a major-party ticket – will be sworn in as the first ever Woman and the first ever Black and Asian American Vice President of the United States of America.

Breathe, America.

And there are even more joyful firsts today:

  • The first US Black Senator from the State of Georgia, Savannah’s fiercest activist son, Reverend Raphael Gamaliel Warnock, will be sworn in;
  • The first Jewish member of the Senate from the Deep South since 1879, Thomas Jonathan Ossoff, will also be sworn in as Georgia’s Senator;
  • And America will have the first ever Second Gentleman, Douglas Craig Emhoff.

Breathe deeper, America.

After four years of being mistreated, tortured, inflicted great mental pain and anxiety, tormented by a buffoonish wannabe dictator and his dishonest duplicitous sycophants, you may be suffering from certain PTSD. You fear joy, you cannot recognize when you’ve won or saved yourselves from certain destruction, you’ve been conditioned to live in constant terror of the next cruelty and you cannot anymore believe in a day where you get to live safely, sanely, without a care of what the occupant of the White House is doing.

So let me make it clear, because sadly far too many have found ways to monetize your misery and your dread, and far too many now find glee in feeding on your despair and your new addiction to the lows of abuse:

After today, there will be no more Mike Pompeo, no more Stephen Miller, no more Betsy DeVos, no more Jared and Ivanka, no more Steven Mnuchin, no more Mike Pence, no more Kayleigh McEnany or even the thought of a Sean Spicer or a Sarah Sanders-Huckabee, no more Mark Meadows, no more Mick Mulvany, no more Wilbur Ross, and you won’t even have to entertain the thought of a William Barr, a Kellyanne Conway, a Rick Perry, an Elaine Cho, a Ben Carson, an Alex Azar, a Kirstjen Kielsen, or a Jeff Sessions getting anywhere near to influencing the occupant of the Oval Office for at least the next four years.

Instead, there will now only be competent qualified people; boring, competent qualified people. And over the first 10 days of the Biden-Harris Administration, while awaiting for their cabinet picks to go through the usual Senate confirmations, the following will be done by executive action:

  • Freeze last-minute Trump administration regulatory actions;
  • Extend federal moratorium on evictions and foreclosures;
  • Extend the Education Department’s suspension of payments for federal student loan debt;
  • Restructure federal government coordination for the COVID-19 pandemic;
  • Activate emergency resources to establish thousands of community vaccination centers;
  • Reverse over 100 of Trump’s rollbacks on health and environmental rules;
  • Pause deportations, reverse travel bans;
  • Count non-citizens in U.S. Census again;
  • etc. and a very long list of uplifting etceteras.

Breathe, America. Breathe deeply, breathe joyfully, breathe with great expectation, and exhale with relief because against all odds, you won yourself some serious HOPE.