With half a million Americans dead, and nearly 100,000 UK dead, in both cases more than all in WW2.
Inauguration 2021
Michael, Bobji Kali myself and a cup of lapsange tea, that became champagne, on a sofa in Magnolia House, Halesworth, on a dull day, watched the US inauguration of Joseph Biden, ordinary Jo from Delaware, who’d been trying for this post for the last 50 years, and finally made it.
Trump has had his time, after a possy of outright lies on the podium, backdrop AirForce 1: how good he was, how brilliant he was to cut taxes, and beware, beware of taxes going up, beware of Liberty being taken away, beware of the unnamed next organisation changing the steady course he set the people on. Thank you, he mimed as the fanfare of YMCA came of the loud speakers.
Cleaverly the team had decked out the grass avenue with flags, where they would have been crowds of people. Yes, remember 4 years ago, this was our first glimpse of how the Trump time would be, the masses of news coverage on the disputed numbers who attended Trumps inaguration. Oh how we tripped up then and continued to be tripped up. No comparison here. The pandemic and the moral high ground of Biden ensured that. Everyone wore masks, a veritable festival of masks.
But the great and good came, Clinton with Hilary in purple, the great Obhamas, George Bush. Standing alone with his stoic expression, Mike Pence, with a certain grace, albeit to recover his own reputation, had organised the day, fulfilling the role of president, while the child went off to play. Yes, it was indeed a good thing Trump was not there, (Biden said it’s one thing I agree with him about) for it was Biden and Kamala Harris’s day. Oh there were loads of first, but Kamala took the basket. Her husband Douglas Craig Emhoff, is the first second gentleman in American history.
Biden’s speech was centered around the need for urgent (war time) action on the pandemic and unity. How uprising and challenge was normal though history.
Who stole the show? The girl in yellow. The Hill We Climb, was the title of her poem.
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.
A game of table tennis with Gabriel, after which we opened the bubbly, and watched as Biden sat at the oval office (photographs of his family already behind him – yes, we know this change over process from West Wing), with a pile of 15 Executive Orders, 3 of which he signed immediately. No time to waste. From revoking the ‘Muslim travel ban’, Defunding Trump’s border wall, and re joining the Paris accord.
Here’s what Sen Ted Cruz had to say (so we still have some Trump moments to come)
Last word with the yellow girl.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
Kalikellett 