Inaugural Highlight, "The Hill We Climb"
by Amanda Gorman, 22, National Treasure
Trump is finally gone! Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as the next President and Vice President of the United States today, Jan 20, 2021. I was moved most as I watched Kamala come onto the stage this morning. Finally, someone like me, representing so much more than me, in that role so close to the top. When Amanda Gorman spoke, it felt incredible, hopeful even. This was a landmark day, marked by relief more than anything.
Biden went on to sign 17 awesome executive orders at the Resolute desk today, rejoining the Paris Climate accord, ending the "Muslim ban" and the Keystone XL pipeline permit, extending a ban on federal evictions, and undoing some of Trump's recent last ditch efforts to make America cruel again. And while I feel great about the executive branch for the first time in four years, I am also skeptical about the ability of Biden, Harris, and their allies to get the biggest things done to truly save the soul of this country, even with a majority in Congress. It is too tall an order, to change vast swaths of the public's belief about the election not being stolen, much less expose the myths of supremacist culture, or reveal the moneyed interests promoting those lies. I heard nothing on day one about hunting down and locking up all the hateful, gun-toting domestic terrorists, or stripping away significant parts of the supremacist structures and policies of this country. Maybe Biden's words of unity were the right words for the moment; time will tell if the administration can meet these most pressing priorities with clear and decisive actions. As others have said, we cannot have unity without accountability. Nevertheless, today certainly represents a much brighter and better direction than the last four years, and I am celebrating, to be sure! I do feel hopeful, I suppose, but it feels too soon to embrace the idealistic optimism that used to be my trademark.
What I actually wanted to put down here tonight is something else. I want to wrap the Trump chapter so I can start to re-focus my attention and time. Perhaps I will be able to write more about other things, be a fuller person if I can get this done. So for posterity, here is what the past four years have been like for me, living in the United States under President Donald Trump.
It has been the longest, darkest few years of my life. I did not plan to spend these past few years as community organizer or pseudo-resistance leader. So much has been lost in this time, personally and societally. It feels like we on the left have fought one fight after another, won some and lost some, grieved and grieved until we have come to believe we may never be happy or hopeful again. Thankfully, I've been in the fight with many sisters and friends, old and new, near and far. Quite often, I've looked to Black and brown sisters and brothers from past and present to help me get back up to stand another day, keep showing up, keep digging deeper. I have tried to pay the fees along the way, but I still owe so many for their inspiration.
Rewind to Nov. 8, 2016. Election Night. Peter and I attended a small gathering of politically-minded friends at a friend’s house, to watch returns and celebrate the election of the first woman president in United States history. There was no doubt in my mind about the outcome. Of course Hillary was going to trounce Donald J. Trump. Peter tried to warn me, but I blew him off; he and Michael Moore were out of touch. Women were ready for this -- and we were making it happen! (Sure, I had volunteered in Ohio for Obama both times he ran, but only did a couple phone banks for Hillary. Phone banks are hard, polls said she is solid, it’ll be fine!) Hillary becoming president was the next logical step after Barack Obama’s 8 years of calm and competent leadership. We are evolving as a society, and the future is bright for our us, our daughters and our country.
Seeing Hillary accept the Democratic nomination had been a powerful preview. I was hit from behind with goosebumps and tears, seeing someone like me in that role. I was just entering a new phase of mid-fifties awareness myself, growing increasingly frustrated by and not ok with the decades of my life spent feeling like an outsider under the deep patriarchal roots of America, roots that had made my own perspective and internal voice turn against me too often… thinking my body is not beautiful as it is; thinking it’s ok if a man takes my idea and restates it as his own, it’s part of my job; thinking that being humble and following the rules are more important than having a strong ego or going against the grain. I was fatigued by the years I’d spent as a strong professional woman who nevertheless limited myself by the boundaries of social expectations for my gender, even when I had the logical or emotional or moral upper hand.
So that election night in 2016 felt like vertigo, as the ground shifted from under my feet, from under our feet. I recall seizing a bottle of red wine and drinking straight from it, knowing I could walk home if needed, or stumble into a bush and just pass out until I woke up and happily found out that the nightmare was exactly that, just silly projections errors we would laugh off and promptly forget about. Friends who were more on top of the numbers left the party early in the evening. They knew which early states we needed, and wanted to grieve in private. Dumb hopeful me still went to bed defeated, and drunk, but thinking there was a glimmer of hope.
At some level, every night since then has been more or less the same. Trying to sleep in a blanket of disbelief, outrage, and despair at the barrage of daily horrors that our country became under Trump… battling the impact of the news with the impulse to get that asshole out of my head and my daily life… taking that nighttime trip to the bathroom just hoping to go back to sleep soundly and forget, to dream away the nightmare of daylight. Then, every morning, waking to face the nightmare another day, the same dark clouds looming, trying to find ways that my actions could make things better, or sometimes a path without guilt to just ignore the suffering and injustices, and make the best of my life. These years have been filled with peaks of anxiety and depths of sadness, difficulty breathing, continually trying to stay balanced on shaky ground.
Of course, there was more to life than this, but in its essence, this is what the past four years have felt like for me, and likely for most of my friends, and I would like to say, for any thinking person who’s been even passively paying attention, although I’m sure that last claim would be challenged by a few people I am related to. I wonder if they have any idea how hard these last four years have been.
(Note this recounting comes from someone who is not a news junkie. I don’t have cable or watch TV news, rarely go on Facebook or Twitter. I read things people send me, scan headlines maybe once a day, read things in the NY Times a few days a week on average, I listen to a few select podcasts weekly. Compared to most of my friends, I stick to a pretty lean news diet most of the time.)
On Nov. 11, 2016, I wrote in a journal: Now that the shock of Hillary’s loss is wearing off, the horror of what is to come is beginning to settle in. The past 2 weeks have been consumed with grieving, talking to friends, feeling nauseated, crying, drinking, reading, trying to cope with one piece of awful news after another. Obama’s hosting President Elect Trump and his wife Melania was a sad, sad, sad thing to watch, like some kind of twisted World Wrestling Federation presidential match-up: King of Class meets Dumpster of Trash! Trump has scrambled to set up a transition team as protests, hate speech and hate crimes explode around the country. We are at war with ourselves already. There are safety pin people and bigots. Trump’s most avid supporters appear, by and large, to be white-supremacists and backward-thinking angry whites. It’s just too much already and we’re still only in November! Leading the world to address climate change, a peaceful world order, civil rights, religious freedom, voting rights, a free press, so many of the things that make the United States of America what it is are at stake with Trump. This is a truly dark, unbelievable time. I wonder if this will end in civil war.
And now we have the past four years of proof; the list of Trump’s daily scandals is dwarfed by the list of lies he has told from the oval office, but when I think of all the horrible things, the terror we on the left have pushed back against time after time, it is deeply exhausting. Trump, with full support of the Republican Party, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, demonizing the press, crying “fake news” about any reporting he doesn’t like, trading constantly in one conspiracy theory after another, shitting on Black Lives, giving the finger to NATO and the WHO while cavorting with dictators, just dragging the US down outside and in, with a cabinet full of incompetent, corrupt, or destructive assholes, the Muslim ban, #MeToo, the gross nepotism of putting his children into key white house positions, inviting foreign interference in US elections, separating scared little children for months on end from their parents and losing the keys to reconnect them, demonizing asylum seekers and immigrants though we are literally a nation of immigrants, elevating white supremacists, encouraging racial violence against Black and brown people, dissing veterans and people who are differently-abled, talking about all women in terms of how they look or whether they are nice or nasty, buying off all those sexual abuse accusers, selling off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other federal park lands, appointing Brett Frat Boy Victim Kavanaugh and all the other incompetent unqualified federal judges appointed, trying to bribe Ukraine to scandalize a political challenger, tanking the USPS and the Census for political gain, refusing to release his taxes or divest from his businesses so that taxpayer money funnels into Trump properties, constant baseless demonization of the other of our 2 political parties, all the name calling and bullying… and that’s just a randomly-ordered list off the top of my head! It has been relentless.
How many times in four years have I texted these words, UGH, SIGH, WTF, F*CK TRUMP about the pussy grabber in chief and the old white men of the GOP, whether those in power or just those who vote that way, holding his hand as he assaults America. It’s disgusting, and even more so now that we know half of this country is not only fine with it, they are still eating this made up conspiracy sh*t right out of his biggest loser hand. As the first president in our history attempts to overturn the results of a free and fair election, Trump’s cult would rather believe that somehow the "evil Socialist-Democrats” rigged the election (but only in the presidential column) than accept their part in the degradation of the US presidency, society, and democracy.
The culmination of these past 4 years was terrifying. On Jan. 6, 2021 thousands of Trump supporters, at his encouragement, stormed the US Capitol in an attempted coup. Violent, armed, entitled, white Hatriots killed 2 Capitol Police officers and ransacked Congressional chambers, hallways, offices. They were out for blood, some wanting to kill Nancy Pelosi or any Democrat, along with Mike Pence and other Republicans over whether they would approve the electoral college vote count (normally a formality; this year, a riotous mess after months of Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him because he’s a child and could not accept that he is the biggest loser in the history of the country). The reception these “insurgents” got at the capitol was gut wrenching. They walked right over the line of police, and there were some officers who were clearly complicit. It was sickening to witness this angry throng just waltz into what most would expect to be a safe, if not sacred public space, after seeing militarized police forces brutalizing, beating, tear gassing, and arresting protestors in the Movement for Black Lives in DC and so many cities over the past months and years. The images and realities of Jan. 6, 2021 were nauseating, frightening, depressing, and most importantly, revealing. We are at war now with ourselves. “An uncivil war” as Biden called it today in his inaugural speech. Domestic terrorists comprise the mainstream of one of our 2 parties. They live among us, and if there is not a swift and public crushing of those extremists, overt white supremacy may yet win again.
Terrorizing. That’s what the past 4 years have been like, in a nutshell.
Though I had canvassed for Obama a bit in 2008 and 2012, I got much more politically active after 2016, and that antidote to the Trump era was critical for me. Aligning my values with my words and actions was a necessity. I went to every protest I could, starting with the women’s march on January 21, 2017. I attended that first one in Nashville, where I was helping Mom recover from knee surgery. I was blown away by the river of rad women and families gathered by the Cumberland river. Back in Irvine, the number of people turning out at the corner of Culver and Alton grew visibly with each Trump administration atrocity. I amplified my volunteer time by organizing activism efforts through DemOC PAC, a federal PAC that went overnight from the cusp of folding to a vibrant, if deeply distraught community of liberals. I also tried to engage and mobilize every single person I could think of over the past 4 years to help with activism: we did door to door canvassing, tons of phonebanking and textbanking; we registered hundreds of young people; we wrote tens of thousands of postcards and letters and emails; we made our own signs and t-shirts, and we marched. When Biden's win was announced, we danced in the rain.
What did my activism get me? I amplified my own political effects by helping to organize others, and I am proud of that work. But one of the best outcomes of these years for me was growing closer through activism to people I knew. Especially satisfying was working with old and new friends on Katie Porter’s 2018 run for Congress, and her very solid win again in 2020. We built a network of like-minded liberal people where there were only isolated connections before. We literally built community here. We ultimately helped Democratic Congressional candidates turn Orange County blue in 2018 for the first time since the 1930s. Sadly, we lost that trophy in 2020. But there are so many people here now whom I just adore, who consistently raise their hands when we call for volunteers, and stretch far beyond their comfort zone… talking to voters at their front doors, making phone calls to strangers, or mastering the technology required to reach people during the pandemic. I’ve been talking trash about Irvine and Orange County for years, but am finally starting to feel that I can bloom where I’m planted.
And collectively, with others around the country, we did our part to reject Donald Trump’s bid for a second term as president. He will go down as a masterful con artist and maybe even a good politician, and he will also go down in history as the worst president this country has ever had, the biggest loser, twice impeached, and a mass murderer, thanks to a mishandled and increasingly tragic failure to respond with a national plan to the global novel coronavirus pandemic. To date, more than 400,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. Today alone, the equivalent of 15 full flights crashed today, and everyone on board died of COVID. Most people would think twice before getting on a plane, given these statistics. Why won’t people stay home, and wear a mask in public? Donald J. Trump is why. Lock him up, along with those who would take down the democracy, and let’s get on with our lives.
What will become of the US is unclear to me. Trump did not attend Biden's inauguration, signaling to the world that he's a cowardly baby, and to his supporters that the lie of a stolen election should be kept alive. Yet GOP leaders Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarty and other astonishingly hypocritical white men did attend, attempting decorum today. They too have a tall task ahead in deciphering what the Republican party stands for. And while having a Kamala Harris in the VP seat is two steps forward, we took one step back on the same stage when J-Lo belted out a blatantly colonial slap in the face, “this land is your land, this land is my land.” Ugh. Biden gave an earnest speech today, with some good things in it. But the theme of unity which has been widely praised all day falls flat with me. We must call this war with domestic terrorism what it is, and publicly reckon with the white-wing forces that seek to trample on truth and destroy the country’s legitimacy. We can’t just hope it will recede. Thankfully, many eyes are more open now, and I understand systemic racism as the baked in drive for greed and power that it is. There is a mighty wall of righteous resistance to the white power “insurrection,” and that gives me hope, for now.
How did I get through these past 4 years? I would like to say it was my healthy sense of humor, but I seem to have lost that thread somehow. Nature saved me daily… trees and trails, ocean and sky. I am so grateful for my friends who have carried these burdens with me. Unwavering moral and financial support from my partner, and the beautifully informed minds and consciences of Zana and Lux have held me up. Travel used to be a source of inspiration and relief, though it’s hard to remember what life was like BC (Before COVID). Mabel, our camper van has been a happy place. And thank goodness for yoga class and my wise teacher, Janet.
In the days since Biden won and with the promise of life in America without a President Trump, I am sleeping well. My breathing goes un-noticed for days. I dream about normal things, like my teeth falling out or losing my car keys. I wake up feeling lighter, well rested. We may still be headed for that civil war, sooner or later, and the ground still has some instability thanks to Trump and GOP leadership spinning out in one long public tantrum. But it’s feeling like we, the majority of people, the caring, thinking people, can likely stand for a while longer. COVID is running rampant, but vaccines are being injected into arms. Hope is tangible.
Though there are still many hard fights ahead for the country, and I know the respite won’t last long, it feels like my grieving is done for now. As much as I want to leave the political realm and works behind, I probably won’t. I am unable to take a seat while others take a stand. This evening, the ground underfoot is solid again. I stand firm in mountain pose, knowing that whatever is next for me, I am unmovable. I stand in tree pose, and know I will flourish come spring.
