Inauguration Day 2021: Sharing My Thoughts To the Blogging World

(Update 1/26/21: Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up!)

So today, we went through Biden's inauguration and nothing bad happened (as of yet, knock on wood), and as part of the change to a new administration the blogging site I always check every day - Balloon Juice - sent out a call for guest bloggers to submit essays to honor the change to a better world we were making this 2021.

So I wrote up a Looking Forward essay, and WaterGirl was nice enough to post it this afternoon, so let me share the link here:

Looking Forward

In taking a minute to look back, I have this feeling since November 2016 of just everything in my life getting put on hold because of what happened to put donald trump in the White House. It was like, here’s the universe chugging along, Hillary Clinton certain to get the popular vote, the political landscape mostly in lockdown because the Congressional Republicans were likely to freeze anything Hillary could do, and yet it felt rather normal: Because since 2011 those Republicans had put a hold on Obama’s ability to transform much of America, and yet we still had a more progressive nation with Gay Marriage rights legitimized along with a general sense that the long arc of history bending towards Justice was still bending that way.

And then trump won the Electoral College and that long arc turned into a pretzel.

I still remember two days after the results were pointing to trump’s victory over normalcy, where one of my library co-workers came up to me and said “get familiar with this word ‘kakistocracy’ because it’ll be everything that trump’s misrule will be.” Good thing I was in a library with a dictionary and found the definition: “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.” I knew with trump in charge – having witnessed up close some of his atrocities of broken land deals and his destruction of a decent spring football league (BRING BACK BANDITBALL) – we were facing a dark era in our nation’s history, but now I had a word to explain it and a way to define it...

I suggest you follow the link and read the rest of what I submitted. I'd like to think it's one of my best works, with some literary flourish...

We can look forward to a Biden administration that ought to respond better to crises and manage our nation’s needs. A Biden administration that ought to follow through on a lot of promises the Democrats made – forgiving personal debts like college loans for example, and helping families with housing and employment funds – that would benefit not just the younger generations but ALL Americans struggling to survive both a pandemic and the darkened remnants of trump’s broken dystopia...

I have more to say about this transition, about the hope we're getting with Biden's incoming tenure, about the scars left behind by trump. But my Internet is out at home, and I'm writing this off my mobile phone-into-hotspot so I'm using a lot of data at the moment. See you later.

We have hopeful days ahead.