That day when the shieldWALL changed from red to blue

I have written 360 shieldWALL essays since my first one appeared on December 2, 2016. That means that this one – number 361 – will be the first essay written when Donald Trump wasn’t either president or president-elect of the United States.

Today, we inaugurated Joe Biden as our 46^th president, and in honor of the occasion, I have changed the color scheme of the shieldWALL from red to blue. I hope you like the change.

Now, to the point:

We don’t know today whether Joe Biden will be a good president, or whether Kamala Harris will be a good vice president, but we know for an absolute certainty that they have to be better than the previous administration that slithered out of Washington this morning without the common decency to stick around until Biden and Harris took their oaths.

If you have read any of my previous 360 essays you know exactly how I feel about Donald Trump, so instead of talking exclusively about him, I’m going to suggest four reasons which guarantee the Biden Administration will be an improvement over the Trump crime family regime.

(1) First up is competence. From Day 1, at the urging of the recently pardoned Steve Bannon, Trump appointed the least competent cabinet in presidential history – a collection of miscreants, morons and money mongers whose task was to destroy the agencies they were appointed to represent. They were mostly old, mostly white and mostly male. Over the next four years, after failing miserably at their jobs, many of them either resigned or were fired so that Trump could plug in a succession of temporary “acting” directors until he found the table full of sycophants he thought would help him become a dictator.

Here’s what I wrote in 2016 about the Trump cabinet nominees:

His attorney general couldn’t be a federal judge because he is a racist. The education secretary hates public education and established the worst private charter school in the country. The commerce secretary won’t help bring back jobs for working people because his career agenda is to lay them off and take away their benefits. The HUD secretary is a neurosurgeon who thinks the Egyptian pyramids are grain silos and has probably never seen Section 8 housing … and probably thinks Section 8 refers to mental illness in the military.

His health secretary is anti-Obamacare and wants to take it away from 20 million people. One of his candidates for interior secretary wants to drill for oil in national parks and shoots caribou from a helicopter. His agriculture secretary just bankrupted Kansas. His Homeland Security director wants to arrest a million people for their Facebook and Twitter posts and ship them to Gitmo without a lawyer or a trial. The EPA director is a climate science denier.

The head of NSA wants to kill Muslim families and torture suspected terrorists … emphasis on the word “suspected.” His chief strategist hates blacks, browns and Jews. (And) his chief of staff is the idiot who oversaw the destruction of the Republican Party.

(2) Diversity: Now comes the Joe Biden cabinet and staff, composed of both men and women and highly qualified individuals who are white, brown, black, native, Christian, Jewish, young, old, gay, straight and transgender. They are not only competent for the positions they have been assigned but diverse as well, representing not the good old (white) boy mentality we saw in Trump’s cabinet room but a true sampling of what America really looks like. I’m excited to see, collectively, what they bring to the table and how they combine their intellect, experience and imagination to move the country forward.

They will make Biden’s job monumentally easier just by being with him in the room.

(3) Third is compassion. How different it will be to have a government staffed by compassionate individuals who sincerely care about the welfare of the citizens they represent. In the time of COVID, compassion has been severely lacking, even as 400,000 Americans have fallen to the disease. For nearly a year no one in government bothered to recognize or mourn the COVID dead until Biden and Harris arrived in Washington last night.

They say compassion is Joe Biden’s super power. I can’t think of a better one.

(For the record, this is the way I described Trump on numerous occasions: Donald J. Trump is a shallow, childish, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who is also a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness. He has admitted to sexual assault and faces court proceedings related to alleged rape, fraud and bribery. He was impeached [twice] by the House of Representatives and found guilty of obstruction of justice by the Mueller investigation. He would be in prison today if not for a dubious Justice Department memo that says a sitting president can’t be indicted.)

(4) Finally, the election of Joe Biden and two Democratic senators from the new blue state of Georgia will give Democrats control over the Senate for the first time since Barack Obama’s first term, breaking the gridlock that Mitch McConnell imposed by blocking virtually all Democratic legislation. Without the Georgia election, McConnell was in a position to hamstring every Biden initiative the way he did to Obama and the Democrats in the House.

Biden faces enough of a challenge to implement and manage a coordinated response to the COVID virus, rescue a crumbling economy, restore environmental and financial policies killed or wounded by Trump and his minions and rebuild America’s standing in the global community. No way could that have happened with Moscow Mitch McConnell in charge of the upper chamber.

There are lots of other reasons why I’m optimistic about the Biden presidency. A fifth reason could be the return of basic decency and decorum to the office of president. Another could be a healthy respect for the rule of law.

I’m going to leave it there for the time being. Who knows? I might write another shieldWALL or two in the coming days. For now, I’m just relieved that the stain has been removed from the highest office in the land, and a whole new cast of characters is about to begin writing the next, better chapter of our history.

Most likely you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine

Assuming that I live until Covid-19 goes away and we can return to a semi-normal life, there are 75 million people I don't want to see, know, hear from, hear about, read about, meet, encounter or share space with on this earth. They're the people who voted for Donald Trump for president a second time. 

If that includes my neighbors who flew Trump banners (one is still doing it), so be it. I didn't know them before Trump and I don't want to know them now.

If that includes any of my relatives, I don't need them either. I didn't pick them. They came with the family because somebody married somebody else. That was not my choice.

And if that includes you, I suggest you stay the hell away from me from now until the end of time. I do not want to be your friend, and that's not negotiable.

What happened on January 6 cannot be excused or simply written off as “patriotism” or "free speech" or a matter of political differences. It was open sedition broadcast live in real time on national TV. This rebellion encouraged by Republican politicians and joined by poorly-educated redneck Fox News viewers loyal to a criminal despot opened a gaping wound in America that cannot be easily healed. And the riot may not be over yet.

The fact that so many of these people still support the 45th president tells you all you need to know about our country. A lot of people like to say this is “not who we are,” but they're wrong. We are exactly who we are. That's undeniable.

The same people now say it's time for healing, but they're wrong about that, too. The time for healing has long ago passed. The drama that played out last Wednesday proves it without a doubt.  The time for healing should have followed immediately after Donald Trump’s conviction in his first impeachment trial when he was clearly guilty of a string of high crimes and misdemeanors, but such a conviction didn’t happen. His party’s failure to do its duty only emboldened Trump and his followers and, several months later, led directly to Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol by people who wanted to overthrow the government, murder the Speaker of the House and lynch the vice president.

It's hard to believe I even typed those words, but every one of them is true.

In my mind, it’s too late for healing and there’s no sense denying what this country has become. It all became too real on January 6 as we watched it with our own eyes, and now we fear what might be coming next.

And we still face a pandemic that wants to kill us all.

I could write a lot more about January 6, but most of it has already been said by somebody else, so I'll skip ahead to my primary point, which is this: Someday when this is all over, there's little hope for  normalcy or healing or a return to the good old days. The best we can hope for is co-existence, and when that day comes, I'll be happy to stay on my side of the street if the Trumpaloons will promise to stay on theirs. Bob Dylan once wrote that “most likely you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine,” and I’ve got 75 million reasons to believe that's true.