My Prayer For The Week

One of the ingrained assumptions of being an American is the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. I have watched it a total of ten times during my adult life, the outgoing President riding in the motorcade with the incoming President from the White House to the Capitol, then sitting behind him and watching him take the oath of office, then politely applauding. Its always a cool moment, satisfying, even comforting. This year at the beginning of inauguration week, I’m holding my breath that it goes off without bloodshed. There will be no huge throng of people on the Mall watching. There will be no parades and no fancy balls to mark the occasion. Only members of Congress, a few guests, and a thousand masks. But there will be 25,000 American Troops and newly erected fencing, even some razor wire, photographs of which will be gleefully distributed on Chinese, Russian, and Iranian media. Add this embarrassment to the growing list of things I thought I would never witness during my lifetime.

So, my hope and prayer is that when this week is over there will have been no violence, no deaths, no destruction of property, that all 50 state capitols will be secure, and that we can begin to move forward to the very difficult task of learning how not to hate each other so much. I wish Joe Biden all the best. I can honestly say that I have wished every new President the very best at the beginning of their term in office. I did for Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump. Generally speaking, when a President fails it’s a failure for the country. When they succeed, generally the country succeeds. Good will should be the default emotion for any new President from every citizen of this country. When Biden does well, I will commend him here. When he screws up I will let him have it in this space. What I will not do is engage in inflamed rhetoric fantasizing about his gruesome death like I saw from Alec Baldwin this weekend. I will not tolerate violent language here. I believe it is possible to disagree, even strongly, with politicians without stooping to ad hominem attacks. After ten years and over 2000 posts, I’m sure if you search thoroughly enough you will find examples of such attacks here, but I hope very few and nothing recently. I am not a perfect witness in this area. Sometimes I forget myself and get caught up in the moment. But we all have to get better at this, better at disagreeing, better at talking to each other.

Maybe, a year from now, we won’t be so obsessed with the travails of politics. Maybe at some point our attention and our interest will be towards more nobler things. Maybe one day soon our disagreements will be less vitriolic. Maybe on that glorious day in the future when the masks finally come off, there will be smiles underneath.