Let’s not repeat the same mistakes

| 9:30 pm EST January 21, 2021
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“May you live in interesting times” is an oft-quoted saying which is meant not as a blessing, but a curse. We have just survived through a period that will be of great interest to future historians, giving us fresh insight into the cruel dimensions of that curse.

Seeing past presidents greeting the new feels as if we are waking from a bad dream. I am reminded of the warm optimism I felt after Obama’s first inauguration. We had finally displaced the Bush regime, with its “extra-legal” incarceration and torture of terror suspects on foreign soil, relentless gutting of environmental protections, and systematic lies that led us to invade Iraq. The daily outrage gave way to a certain calm, an inner peace that was, sadly, not shared by all of my countrymen.

Obama lulled many of us into complacency because we didn’t feel the need to babysit him. We didn’t wake each morning to scan the headlines for the latest outrage, or to shake our heads at an infantile tweetstorm. Good governance is boring.

But we failed him. We allowed Obamacare to be dismantled with dishonest claims of “death panels.” We failed to recognize the true threat of viral “birther” conspiracies. When Mitch McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings for a supreme court nominee, we never flooded the streets of Washington with protesters. When T***p became the GOP nominee for president, we laughed, confident that our fellow Americans would never in a million years put such a flawed man in the White House.

Let’s not repeat the same mistakes. We must diligently guard our democracy even – especially when it is in safe hands, by paying attention, speaking out, volunteering, and voting. We must redouble our efforts now if we are to capitalize on the hard-fought gains that brought us to this new dawn.