(originally posted to Daily Kos on 7 Nov 2020, 10:59 PM)
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” — Winston Churchill
As the high of N7 Day’s Biden-Harris victory begins to fade, the titanic amount of work ahead can seem daunting — because it is. Even if Democrats win both of Georgia’s two runoffs to reclaim the Senate by a hairsbreadth, there are still at least 71 million Americans who are okay with racism, sexism, fascism, and rampant corruption, as long as liberals cry and rich people get tax breaks. There’s going to be a lot of talk, some of it fair, that electing Biden won’t solve the countless problems we face. But this is a reminder of what it does solve:
America will rejoin the Paris climate accords. We’ll rejoin the WHO. President Biden will repeal the Muslim ban. Dreamers will be safe. Refugees to this country won’t fear having their children torn from them. Biden will create a Covid-19 panel that will actually face the pandemic. Racial awareness training will be restored. America will support its allies and not tyrants opposed to our union. Biden will reverse rollbacks of more than a hundred public health and environmental policies.
We’ll have a sane Secretary of State. An Attorney General more concerned with protecting America than lawsuits against the President. A Secretary of Defense who won’t tear-gas protesters in the nation’s capitol. Secretaries of Energy, Interior, and Education who strive to promote those departments rather than privatize and destroy them. A National Security Advisor whose job is actually National Security.
There won’t be a constant parade of grifters and crooks getting arrested for doing the President’s dirty work. We won’t fear the President firing vital members of the diplomatic corps or intelligence community by tweet. Biden won’t betray and abandon allies on a whim because a foreign adversary complimented him. We won’t have to fear a President throwing paper towels into a crowd victimized by a hurricane (and I will never forgive the Grifter-in-Chief for that). The White House will be an enemy of White supremacists rather than a friend to them. And if a Supreme Court judgeship opens up, McConnell might block the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we won’t get another Kavanaugh or Barrett.
Yes, Covid-19 will continue to rage across the country, especially with the MAGA-heads bound and determined to defy reason and sanity. Biden won’t clean out every corrupt police force overnight, or even with eight years in office. He can’t stop mega-corporations from dumping toxins into our air, water, and food every second of the day. This is not the end of any of our struggles. It is, however, the end of the beginning. At long last.
Robin
Robin Phoenix (formerly Roland X, they/them): A lifelong liberal/progressive, I’m proud to be part of the struggle for environmental, social, and economic justice. As a mixed race, non-binary neo-pagan, I’m also a living progressive Bingo card. *g*