Tag Archives: Joe Biden

Benicia’s Stephen Golub: The Long Walk Home

A Promised Land – Politics. Policy. America as a Developing Country, by Stephen Golub, December 16, 2020

Our Long Walk Home

We started this week.

Rounding the Corner

Bruce Springsteen’s 2006 song, “Long Walk Home,” offered a stark metaphor for George W. Bush’s America. The protagonist returns to a hometown peopled by friends who, having abandoned their ideals, have become strangers to him.

Since 2016, that feeling has rung true for many of us, arguably to an even greater extent.

But the song is also resolute and hopeful about the long walk back to enduring ideals, a better town and a better country. Its most memorable lines are:

You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone

Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t

That positive message came to mind this week, as the nation stepped back from a president who would do anything he could get away with and as we took key steps toward installing a successor who values the public interest and public health.

More specifically, the Electoral College officially affirmed Joe Biden as President-elect. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans finally recognized Biden’s win, albeit shamefully belatedly.

Moreover, a New York nurse received the first shot in the national coronavirus inoculation campaign. The FDA cleared a second vaccine for imminent approval.

To use a phrase that Donald Trump misused so often, so dishonestly and so ridiculously, we’re finally rounding the corner.

A Rough Road

We still face an awfully long, awfully rough road ahead. In addition to the good news, the week also saw the United States top 300,000 official Covid fatalities (with the true Covid toll, measured in excess deaths, standing at over 350,00).

The worst is yet to come this deadly winter. Total lives lost here could reach half a million or more. Debates and egregious inequities regarding vaccine distribution will roil our country and the world.

We also could see Trump at his worst in his final weeks in office. Both before and after he sails off into his post-presidency sewer, he’ll do his best to poison our democracy. His supporters will try to make a fiasco out of Congress’s normally pro forma tallying of electoral votes on January 6. And if there is one lesson we’ve learned about Trump, there’s no low to which he won’t go, including lows we might not even imagine.

Finally, it’s clear that our problems transcend Trump. Even if he disappears from the scene, he’ll leave behind a Republican Party whose de facto denigration of democracy is only rivaled by its refusal to address climate change and the myriad other problems plaguing the country. What’s worse, a big chunk of the public supports such stands.

Back to Bruce

Which brings us back to Bruce and to some sense of hope. His assertion, “that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone,” takes on retrospective resonance. The judiciary, including many Trump appointees, consistently rejected the president’s preposterous attempts to overturn the election. That flag still flies.

Springsteen’s insistence that there are certain things we won’t do originally applied to the Bush administration’s violations of our values, with torture topping the list. The administration shattered standards set in stone (even as it upheld some others, such as the president preaching tolerance toward Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11). It did so at the price of what the flag represents, of ideals we needed to restore.

Trump has committed so many transgressions that it’s hard to know where to begin listing what he’s done that previous American presidents would not do. Costing hundreds of thousands of lives through pandemic denialism and lies? Ripping hundreds of migrant children from their parents, perhaps permanently? Spewing and spreading hate at every opportunity? Seeking to destroy our democracy?

We’ve Been Here Before

But let’s recall the good news: This week saw us set out on the long walk to undo Trump’s legacy, to restore some normalcy and decency to our governance, to launch policies that will help millions of Americans and – after months of incompetence, indifference and disinformation – to conquer Covid.

We’ve trekked on such paths many times before in our history, never completing the journey but often achieving  significant success. Springsteen wrote “Long Road Home” two years before Barack Obama’s election most recently took us back onto a positive course.

Obama’s presidency was far from perfect. However, he led the country out of a very dark phase, rescued it from an economic abyss, enacted health care reforms that helped many millions and otherwise showed us what our better angels can accomplish. The fact that Trump succeeded Obama does not negate such progress.

Begin Again

A “Long Road Home” also says this:

Here everybody has a neighbor, everybody has a friend

Everybody has a reason to begin again

My father said, “Son, we’re lucky in this town, it’s a beautiful place to be born…

We can begin again by grasping how lucky we still are, compared to so many other countries on their own obstruction-strewn roads.

I know that “lucky” is that last word we might want to use, in view of both the last four years and our many troubling long-term trends. I by no means suggest that we should be happy with our situation.

Nonetheless, America’s relative levels of wealth, education, resources, security and institutional independence and competence place us in a better state than numerous less fortunate nations. We should remain aware that reformers and ordinary citizens in those places have prevailed over their own, even more desperate plights or are now striving to do so.

Consider South Africa, for instance. Nelson Mandela aptly named his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom partly because of the decades of sustained struggle he and his anti-apartheid movement undertook. Like his fellow non-white citizens, he endured potentially spirit-crushing racist indignities and abuses for much of his life. He then spent 27 years in prison.

Yet, to paraphrase a line from Trump ally McConnell, Mandela persisted.

And he prevailed, leading the defeat of apartheid and ascending to his country’s presidency in 1994.

And consider Cambodia. As I write this, an old friend and other leaders of the country’s pro-democracy opposition party plan to fly back there from abroad early next month, to face trial and quite possibly jail on trumped-up charges.

Why? In order to shine an international light on the repressive thugocracy ruling the country. And to continue, potentially at great cost, their own long walks to freedom.

We can ignore such other nations’ struggles that should inspire us. We can view the wreckage Trump has wrought as impossible to overcome. We can surrender to the obstacles that he, McConnell and so many others throw in our path. We can understandably wonder what kind of populace accords him so many votes.

Or we can accept that the fight for freedom is never-ending, that the long walk home is grueling and that, while we can never get all the way there, we have reason to begin again.

***********************************************************************

If you’re up for a beautiful rendition of “Long Walk Home,” here it is:

If you’re in the mood for something comical about Trump’s rounding-the-corner claims, here you go:

Read the details in GSA letter to Biden stating that transition can formally begin

By Roger Straw, November 2020

Although Emily Murphy sounds defensive and a bit whiny in her letter, it does reveal some interesting details about the upcoming transition.  Read the letter here. (Click on the image for the 2-page PDF version.)

Click the image to read the letter.

GSA Administrator Emily Murphy finally starts the transition process

Trump Administration Finally Clears Way For Biden Transition To Begin

“I have always strived to do what is right,” GSA administrator Emily Murphy said in a letter to the president-elect on Monday.

Huffington Post, By Nick Visser, November 23, 2020
GSA Administrator Emily Murphy arrives to tesitfy during the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee hearing on "GSA (General Services Administration) Oversight Hearing" on Wednesday, March 13, 2019.
Emily Murphy, Trump appointed administrator of the General Services Administration

Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, said the transition between President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden can begin, releasing millions of dollars in funds and clearing the way for a new administration.

“I have dedicated much of my adult life to public service, and I have always strived to do what is right,” Murphy wrote in a letter to Biden on Monday. “Please know that I came to my decision independently, based on the law and the available facts. I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any Executive Branch official — including those who work at the White House or GSA — with regard to the substance or timing of my decision.”

Trump thanked Murphy for her work just moments later.

Biden’s campaign released a statement shortly after Murphy’s announcement, calling the decision a “needed step to begin tackling the challenges facing our nation, including getting the pandemic under control and our economy back on track.”

“This final decision is a definitive administrative action to formally begin the transition process with federal agencies,” the Biden-Harris transition executive director, Yohannes Abraham, said in a statement. “In the days ahead, transition officials will begin meeting with federal officials to discuss the pandemic response, have a full accounting of our national security interests, and gain complete understanding of the Trump administration’s efforts to hollow out government agencies.”

The president noted on Twitter that while he still planned to fight the outcome of the election, he agreed the transition should begin “in the best interest of our country.”

“I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same,” he wrote.

The move will make $6.3 million available to Biden and his team to begin the transition process, as well as additional funds to prepare his staff and appointees.

Murphy had drawn widespread ire over her delay in “ascertaining” that Biden won the election, which is required before millions of dollars in transition funds and access to government officials can begin. She said, however, that Trump’s bevy of court losses and the certification of votes in several battleground states had allowed her to determine that Biden was the likely winner of the election.

Murphy added that she received many threats amid the delay in what she called an “effort to coerce me into making this determination prematurely,” although they, too, had not influenced her decision.

“I do not think that an agency charged with improving federal procurement and property management should place itself above the constitutionally-based election process,” she wrote Monday.

Several notable figures had lambasted the Trump administration over the delay, saying any further refusal to declare Biden the winner could hamper the country’s efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which has entered its most dangerous stage as the country beings to travel en masse before the holiday season.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said last week he was “concerned” that things hadn’t gone “smoothly” and Biden said “more people may die” if Trump kept obstructing the transfer of power.

“As my chief of staff, Ron Klain, would say … a vaccine is important. It’s of little use until you’re vaccinated,” Biden said last week upon questioning about the rollout of any coronavirus preventative. “So how do we get the vaccine, how do we get over 300 million Americans vaccinated? What’s the game plan?”

Anthem for the Biden / Harris era

I am in tears of joy (again) as I offer to you this moving piece.  Hearing it on our old CD earlier today, I was moved to tears, realizing it is the perfect anthem of hope for the years ahead.  Thank you in advance, Joe and Kamala!  And thank you Mamuse and Thrive.  Enjoy.  – Roger Straw

We Shall Be Known

Composed by Karisha Longaker of Mamuse, November 2016
Recorded by Mamuse  https://youtu.be/dX11MEtbkXI
Also recorded (and shared here) by the Thrive East Bay Choir  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhjaN72dRQ

We shall be known by the company we keep
By the ones who circle round to tend these fires
We shall be known by the ones who sow and reap
The seeds of change, alive from deep within the earth

It is time now, it is time now that we thrive
It is time we lead ourselves into the well
It is time now, and what a time to be alive
In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love
In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love

We shall be known by the company we keep
By the ones who circle round to tend these fires
We shall be known by the ones who sow and reap
The seeds of change, alive from deep within the earth

It is time now, it is time now that we thrive
It is time we lead ourselves into the well
It is time now, and what a time to be alive
In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love
In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love