1/20/2021 - a New Beginning
Friends,
I’m sure you, like me, watched the Inaugural festivities with rapt attention after four years of misery, anxiety, uncertainty and fear. Whether it was the straight talk of challenges and hope offered by President Biden, the uplifting songs sung by Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Garth Brooks or the performance of Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman that left me speechless, today’s event set the stage for a new day in America. A day that acknowledges the very real and very scary problems of the global pandemic, the economic plight of tens of millions of Americans, the climate crisis and the schism in our society fueled by misinformation and social media bubbles that have gained currency and support these past four years.
Today’s changing of the guard signals a whole new approach to the management of our country, where facts and data guide decisions, partisan rhetoric is sidelined and the health and wellness of our people is put front and center. It is not about me, it is about we - we the people. This is what we can look forward to in the coming days, months and years. Hopefully the rapid implementation of policies that actually help most people will change the perspective of those who didn’t vote for our President, and that they will rely on their first-hand ground truth rather than propaganda to guide both how they’ll conduct themselves as citizens of our country as well as how they’ll engage and vote in the future. I am an optimist so I can hope, but I’d prefer to deliver concrete benefits to the cynical and disenfranchised rather than trying to win a war of words. I’m much rather win the war of actions.
A some of you know this has been a particularly difficult time for me. My mother died less than two weeks ago, and between election fatigue post-Georgia Senate races (we did it, friends, didn’t we?!) and this biblical loss, I’ve had a hard time feeling the joy or purpose to write. My mother Lenore hated Trump and his cronies so much, and hoped for his ultimate comeuppance on a daily basis. I was in the hospital with her when President Biden was declared the victor, but she was already too addled by late stage dementia to experience the joy so many of us felt. I thought a lot about her when both Senators Ossoff and Warnock won their races, as well as today during President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’s inauguration. She’d have been so happy, and so proud of my efforts and those of my wife Carin and our activist friends for working hard to change the management, tone and approach of our country’s leadership. She had firebrand tendencies in her days, marching for desegregation in Bloomington, Indiana when she was a student at Indiana University at age 16 and almost got kicked out of her sorority. She worked hard for high quality eldercare during her 14 years on the Board of The Council for the Jewish Elderly in Chicago. She was a volunteer activist role model for my sister and me, and we’ve both tried to take this forward in our adult lives.
While I personally feel gratified now that the new Administration is finally in place, and proud of all of my friends and everyone who worked to make this a reality, there is just so much work to do. But I am reminded of all that my mother lived through - the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, the Space Race, nuclear proliferation, the fracturing of the Soviet Union and so much more - and that she and her peers pressed forward and took on seemingly intractable challenges time and time again. It is now our time to step up, to deliver for our citizens and to regain our position as a conscientious leader on the world stage, and I am confident that we can and will do it. Because we must.