Healing our national wounds will not be easy

 “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”   - Abraham Lincoln

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln attempted to assuage the heated emotions of a nation that had just been ripped apart by a Civil War, fought mainly over ending our national shame with slavery.  Inspiring as it was he still forfeited his life a little over a month later at the hands of a bitter opponent.  Since then, the desires for the South to rise again have echoed among white supremacists groups, emboldened early on with the release of the 1915 racist silent film, “Birth of a Nation”

The founders’ attempt at creating a united nation never really materialized fully following the ratification of our Constitution.  Race was and has been the unsettling issue that keeps us divided.  It was felt that following Obama’s election to the presidency that it would no longer be a contentious problem.  But systemic racism is perhaps as strong now as it has ever been over the last century and a half.  And there is little doubt that many of those Trump supporters chanting “make America great again” were simply anxious to remove a president they saw as an unnatural American of African-Muslim dissent.

I was recently reminded that the virtue of grace is given, not earned.  It was this attempt at promoting grace however that seemed to fall short for Lincoln.  Nonetheless, I believe grace should always be the guiding light be which we confront our adversaries.  This however doesn’t entail ignoring those people with deep-seated hates and who are bent on violence.  The specter of extremist behavior threatens stability in any society and opens the door to repressive authoritarianism.

In his recent article “A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath” conservative author and former Republican Tom Nichols cogently articulates what most of us have become aware of over the last four years.

“America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.”

It’s not clear exactly how Trump will behave between now and January 20th when Joe Biden takes over that office but with Trump’s incompetence in handling the pandemic he claimed would disappear after the election, we’ll see it become more widespread and more detrimental to our economy.

Not wanting to be seen as a loser either, Trump will likely go out kicking and screaming much like the spoiled child being removed from the store by his parents because he didn’t get the toy he wanted.

In an interview conducted in 2014 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael D’Antonio, Trump was asked to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself”, he said “because I might not like what I see.”   

In her tell all book about her uncle, Mary L Trump reveals how this loser demon came to possess Donald at an early age by his father Fred’s insistence that they inherit his killer instincts and a take-no-prisoners attitude.  It was this fear of failing in the eyes of his father that would have a life long impact and lead him to lash out later at John McCain as a loser along with the American WWI dead buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, when he visited France in 2018

Biden will restore sanity and maturity to the oval office but Trumpism is something that will persist for decades and could become more competent.  Mutating this destructive DNA in ways that resemble civil behavior will require a resolve by all of us who plucked democracy from the ashes on November 3rd.  Hopefully through acts of grace but accompanied by a “firmness in the right as God gives us to see right”, the better angels of our nature should prevail.