Post Seventy-Four

       

INAUGURATION

January 20, 2021

The first presidential inauguration  I remember was the inauguration of President Kennedy in 1961. Sixty years ago I remember my eleven year old self observing a civic process I did not fully understand but which filled me with a sense of awe and hope. Even then I was able to discern a reassuring nobleness in the moment that pointed my awakening social consciousness to the importance of believing in something more grand than policy battles and political squabbles.  

My trust in that nobleness has been tested over the years. The assasination of JFK in 1963 shook me deeply. The certitude I embraced growing up in Frankfort, Michigan began to unravel as I watched the nightly news in 1965 and saw civil rights marchers being assaulted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It took another hit as the Vietnam War caused me to question my easy assumptions about war, peace, and my Christian devotion to Jesus the Christ. My alternative service as a United Methodist Volunteer assigned to The Interfaith Center for Racial Justice opened my eyes to the evil of systemic racism buried in our culture - the unfinished business of four hundred years of slavery.

Other experiences pointed me in a more hopeful direction. Civil rights and voting rights legislation in the later years of the 1960s seemed like progress in the quest for liberty and justice. The election of President Obama convinced me that our progress was real and unstoppable. I told myself in 2016 that there were not enough angry old white men left in America to elect Donald Trump.

I was so wrong. Donald Trump was elected and the four years of his presidency proved to be far worse than I  ever imagined they could be. His cruelty, dishonesty, coruption and pettiness exceeded my worse fears. More troubling was the way Republican political leadership lined up to support his behavior abandoning their own oath of office for the sake of political expediency. My despair became unbearable with the assault upon the capital building. I told friends that it seemed like we were living in an old episode of The Twilight Zone.

Today Joe Biden was installed as the 46th President of the United States. Kamela Harris was sworn in as Vice President. Amanda Gorman summarized the restoration of hope with this amazing poem:

“The Hill We Climb”
Amanda Gorman

When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect, we are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: that even as we grieved, we grew, even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we’ll forever be tied together victorious, not because we will never again know defeat but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one should make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in in all of the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare it because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. That would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy, and this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can periodically be delayed, but it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us, this is the era of just redemption we feared in its inception we did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour but within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves, so while once we asked how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.

We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be, a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free, we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, our blunders become their burden. But one thing is certain: if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left, with every breath from my bronze, pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one, we will rise from the golden hills of the West, we will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution, we will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states, we will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.

I feel like I can breathe again after four years of waiting to exhale.

1961 TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD CELEBRATES THE INAUGURATION OF JFK