It was a thing of beauty: a light blue, shining sky, a magnificent hymn, a powerful benediction, poetry, patriotic music and a speech in which President Joseph Biden called first and foremost for national unity, mentioning along the way such things as love, liberty, honor and truth. Can he help provide this unity? We don’t know yet, but his inauguration was a signal of hope and it’s impossible to imagine a more vivid contrast to the revolting riot 14 days earlier.
Both were at the Capitol, the governmental center of this country, bringing to mind a line from the great writer of verse William Butler Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” he told us. Biden wisely did not mention Donald Trump, but he has obviously been part of the story, not in many of his policies that were exceptional, but in a scatter-brained, petty, vindictive, uninformed manner that even made his inauguration very different. Remember how he immediately went to war with the press for not printing misinformation to the effect that the inauguration crowd was bigger than it was?
Trump is not excused because there are leftists of similar ilk, but there are, such as those who endorse conspiracy theories about Russian collusion, threaten Supreme Court justices, viciously demean the 74 million people who voted for Trump and would reverse Trump by reversing his best policy results.
Biden was right to emphasize we can disagree without anger, that history, faith and reason advise us that we should not be adversaries so much as neighbors. Let’s end this “uncivil war” of rural folks vs. urban folks, of conservatives vs. liberals, and veer more toward tolerance and humility, he said, but how do we get there?
