Who We Are

After the events yesterday in Washington DC, it hardly seems appropriate for me to just have another "pop culture post of the day" here. And yet, my ongoing mental processing of what happened has yet to yield much that feels worth saying. So instead, I'll repeat (and embellish on) something I saw somewhere that resonated deeply with me.

Right now, I do not want to hear the phrase "this isn't who we are."

Joe Biden ran his campaign on the premise of bringing the country together. That "theory of the case" garnered the most votes, proving it was indeed the message more Americans wanted to hear. And inasmuch as this is the United States of America, unity is indeed what we need. But we also need to acknowledge reality.

President Obama always maintained an outstretched hand -- even when it was unceremoniously slapped away. That's almost certainly the way he needed to play it too; white privilege is still an unfair constraint even on a person of color who has risen to the highest office in the country. (How much worse would the backlash against him have been had he not been unfailingly level-headed?)

President Biden, on the other hand, needs to first try for unity. Then when he meets resistance (when, not if), he needs to use the power given him (thank you, Georgia; congratulations, Warnock and Ossoff!) to get the job done. And to have any hope of fixing the problem, it must be properly diagnosed.

It's okay to say "this is not who we should be" or "we cannot continue like this." But America: this is absolutely who we are. This happened here. And you can guarantee it will happen again if we pretend the political landscape right now isn't a drought-afflicted forest in which people are running around with matches. We cannot ignore these arsonists; we must disarm them.

The violence, the destruction, the deaths that resulted from yesterday's riots were enough to make a few Republicans change their tunes (and their votes) when they reconvened in the evening to complete the ceremonial certification of the election results. But too many of these members of Congress persisted in their theater of useless objections, which could really serve only one of three possible purposes:

1) They truly believed the election had been stolen from Trump. In which case, they are so divorced from facts and reality that they are hopelessly lost. You will never be able to pierce their media bubble and "reach across the aisle" to these people.

2) They have aspirations for higher political office in the future, and have calculated that this is the move they need to make for that to happen. In which case, they are appealing to the very mob that did this, and are thus explicitly working to ensure something like it will happen again.

3) They're playing for the approval of Donald Trump. In which case, they're seeking adoration from the unreciprocating narcissist who incited the mob to violence.

None of these three motives is acceptable. The flames these people are stoking must be completely starved of oxygen, or they will burn everything down. And yet, these people are very much "who we are" right now in America.

If we do not acknowledge that reality, it is who we will continue to be.