The events of today, January 6, 2021, will, as FDR once said, “live in infamy”. The insurrection being perpetrated as I write has been fueled by a man who had no business being the President of the United States, and who has proven over and over in the past four-plus years that he cares for nothing but his own agenda. If anyone doubted it before, the rogue actions of his base today at the Capitol, where Congress tries to confirm the recent Presidential Election, are the final, sad seal of his toxicity.
Anarchists and conspiracy theorists, as well as those who are just not well informed, are using Trump as the justification for their lawless actions. They are breaking windows and roaming the halls of Congress without masks against a pandemic they do not believe in, but with the guns that they do believe in. What is their ultimate goal? If you were to ask them, would you get consistent answers? Probably not.
But what is becoming clear is the fact that they cannot and will not successfully effect the chaos they want. The rest of the country is beginning to coalesce against this insanity. Republicans and Democrats alike are now defending the true principles of the Republic these violent and often oblivious mobs know nothing about. They are disparaging the violence being perpetrated and they are harkening to the oft-repeated, glorious strains of praise for the more perfect union we have always striven for. Finally.
And that is why, as we move forward after the lunacy of today, when wiser and cooler heads prevail, we should look again at the Second Inaugural of one of our greatest leaders. We should look again at his lofty phrases because his words are the very ones we need at this moment as we endeavor to restore that union to a greater perfection. We must move from the lunacy, the lies and the ignorance of the past four years and try to find what connects us instead of what divides us. And in the words of that great Sixteenth President:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among [us].”
So, as we see those who would divide and destroy, let us find among us those who will fight for the right. Let us unite as Liberals and Conservatives, black and white, rich and poor, to find our common ground. And let us work toward that more perfect union with those who may seem different from us, but who share in the ideals that upon which this country was founded. That is what the “people” do, and that is how we keep our Republic.
