Right now, lots of enthusiastic and confident people are gearing up for the hoopla and pageantry of Inauguration Night 2021— the parties, the dancing, the stunningly-opulent finery, the expensive catering, lavish and extravagant festivities planned — just like normal on a normal Inauguration Day in a normal America.
How cruelly insulting that will be for millions of Americans suffering in this country. The equivalent atrocity would have been like holding a gala USO Christmas dance for all at the US base in Honolulu on the evening of December 7, 1941 — open to all who weren’t killed or severely wounded, that is.
Celebrating a victory before anything concrete has been achieved is presumptuous and arrogant. Any festivities to celebrate “winning” this January would be akin to Pearl Harbor’s survivors celebrating the end of the Japanese attack. “Yay! They stopped bombing and killing us! Time to party!”
Joe, forgo the showy and ego-pleasing parties. New Dem Senate majority, please do the same. It will only look like exulting in this new ticket to your own personal power and self-advancement. While you are smiling and dancing and drinking very expensive champagne and wearing very expensive clothing, chatting with very important people in a very expensive banquet hall, tens of thousands of Americans will be gasping for breath on a ventilator, or have tapped out all their financial resources, or be evicted with nowhere to go. Thousands of imprisoned asylum seekers will still suffer being treated as animals.
Skip the fancy, empty, self-serving parties this Jan 20, all you people who we elect that are supposed to be looking out for us. Either that or open them up to all comers, no matter race, sex, religious belief, financial standing, or social prominence. Give the money you’d spend on brand-new clothes to a homeless shelter, the money entertaining to a food bank, the minutes you’d fritter away on giddy transient pleasures to start right then working on legislation and changes to reverse the terrible policies forced upon America the past 40 years.
Joe, the best thing you could do after the Inauguration is go home, rest up, have a hearty meal, then begin writing and signing the overwhelming number of EOs you’ll need to do your part to erase Trump’s vandalism.
Don’t let the first thing you do as president is party. Skip that, Joe. Get right to work instead. I guarantee that will give you a lock on a second term.