America’s Promise Seems Distant Now, but It Will Be Back

Candace Rondeaux 

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America’s longest winter is not yet over. But the inauguration this week of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala D. Harris should reassure the country and the world that though the promise of American reinvention seems distant, it will come again.

We have arrived at this moment violently, as usual. With baseball bats and long guns cradled in our arms, some of us Americans pulled on battle fatigues, convinced that the war for the soul of a nation could be won with just a little more menace—not just on TV or on Facebook, but in Washington and other state capitols. When that outrage and other tricks didn’t work, Donald Trump’s supporters cast their mind’s eye backward through history, all the way to 1776. Hooked by the Big Lie, they wandered through the fog of American supremacy, dragging the whole country and democracy along with them. All the while, the death toll from the virus spreading through the land rapidly rose, hitting 250,000, then 300,000, then 350,000, and higher.

Out there, distant from each other and grieving, some of us Americans turned a blind eye to the collateral damage, choosing instead to whitewash our political fences. Even as the lines for food snaked down our streets, it became an urgent priority for some to paint over American history, including the evils of slavery and the memory of Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race slave who, after rising up against colonial tyranny in 1770, lay in state at the insistence of the man who would become our second president. In the mood of forgetting, it was made clear through banal repetition and petty bureaucratic fiat that references to 1619, when the first slave ship landed in the British colony of Virginia, would no longer be tolerated in a government by some of the people for some of the people. Imagine the shock when, after 81 million people had spoken on Nov. 3 in favor of a different vision for America, that manifesto fell flat.

Now, here we are again, divided like before and like always, unable to decide whether we can all say what we mean at home and yet still mean what we say abroad. The other part of us wants to dance, laugh and celebrate. But, heads on a swivel, we are mindful of what has not, and probably will not, keep us warm in this darkest American season. Before the thaw, the new death toll from COVID-19—500,000—looms ahead. So, we temper our relief with reminders that it is not over.

We would like to think that Jan. 6 was not us, or at least not all of us. But the siege at the Capitol was us, not an aberration. Or it was at least no more so an anomaly than the election of a Black woman as vice president who, only a few decades ago, would have been barred from drinking from the same water fountain as the White man she is now serving alongside in the White House. Those contrasts and contradictions have always been the two sides of American history. And like it or not, in their first 100 days, Biden and Harris aim to prove that all of us Americans are in this struggle together—and always have been and will be.

It will be rough going. The part of us still clutching at another version of American history has not yet holstered its sidearm and may not do so anytime soon. Investigations are ongoing into the collective conspiracy of delusion among some Americans, even as Trump—using the royal “we”—vows to come back “in some form.” We are still, some of us, cocked for a fight, ready to tear down the temple on our own heads so we can keep alive the myths about the election and keep sacred the privilege of running unopposed from those on our farthest right flank. The White House will still have to be scrubbed, and, with Trump’s impeachment trial pending, April will still probably be cruel.

This is the America we have, not the America we wished we had. Blackened eye, tooth chipped, this is also the America that will keep showing up when the world calls.

Yet with the Capitol dome glistening white in the backdrop on Wednesday, just a few feet away from where just two weeks earlier a cop in blue bled red, we longed for a sign that the January sun would break through the chill and the wind. We long for it to warm the land again. Up on the dais, our elders, clergy, singers, firefighters, police, soldiers and poets all wondered: Will we make it? “Have we become too jaded?” the senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, asked as we began to turn a new page in the story of American democracy. No, the union will go on, she assured us, and we have no choice but to believe her.

True, as the senator from Missouri, Roy Blunt, reminded us, “We are more than we have been, and we are less than we hope to be.” In fact, as the priest who delivered the invocation said, “We come before you in need, indeed on our knees.” This is the America we have, not the America we wished we had. Blackened eye, tooth chipped, bloodied and bruised, a cancer of racism and deep economic inequality ravaging it, this is also the America that will keep showing up when the world calls.

This is the same America that showed up on the beaches of Normandy. It is the same America that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then helped rebuild what was broken brick by brick in Tokyo and trial by trial at Nuremburg. We all—the world over—look longingly to that time when the entire planet seemed afire with hatred but, still alive with love, resisted its dark pull. That America is the past, and the world now faces the present of a world aflame with wildfire, drought and disease.

This is the same America that staved off total global annihilation in its nuclear duel with the Soviet Union by adopting the mantle of space conqueror and serial intervener. This is the same America that fomented coups, toppled governments, financed proxy armies and first set foot on the Moon. We forgot all that briefly, and so did the world, until 19 young men bred into suicide soldiers and borne on jets that were products of our collective ingenuity and hard labor reminded us that in every season and generation, there can always be blowback.

Now, exhausted and confused after wandering wrathfully from Kabul to Baghdad in search of a peace that can only truly first be won after we reconcile with our legacy and each other, the same America is still reeling. This is the same America that for more than two centuries has been caught up in the perilous fight between the ideal that we are all created equal, and the notion that we’re divided by the skin we’re born in, the ones we love and the gods we worship.

Only, now, out here in this wilderness, we have discovered again that the soil we share will remain parched without a fierce love of truth and justice. Nothing will grow until we do what Biden urged: reject “lies told for power and for profit.” It is all but guaranteed that our “uncivil war” will go on for a while longer. But when we are in a fit of forgetting America, again, we must go together to Arlington, as we did to Selma, and remember that the cherry trees always blossom and spring always comes.