73. The Calm

I imagine that the hospitals, doctors’ offices, nursing homes and assisted living facilities are still in a state of high urgency. And people on reservations, and in Black and Latinx neighborhoods that have been hard-hit by the Covid, are dealing with daily on-going crises. And in hundreds of thousands of families there is great grief and sense of loss for those who have died. 

 

But for most of the millions of Americans who have been able to keep our distance from the Covid—even some of us who’ve come very close—this is a time of calm, a reprieve from weeks, no months, of non-stop drama and trauma. The election is over. There are no longer hourly tweets from the president. The long string of lawsuits and rallies behind and in front of the lawsuits has subsided. Slowly, and often in less than dramatic fashion, with words still couched around some kind of presidential support, Republican Congressmen and Women and Senators are acknowledging Joe Biden’s election.

 

On his part Joe Biden has slowly and measuredly made cabinet and White House appointments. There’ve been occasional spurts of disappointment—“Obama 2,” Washington “insider”—and loud, happy exhales with Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico as Secretary of the Interior and Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense. An Indian woman running the Interior Department, which has all reservations as well as millions of acres of resource rich public lands under its purview, is frankly revolutionary; a black Secretary of Defense overseeing a United States military, in which 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty are people of color, is long overdue. These things feel good. 

 

And there is the vaccine, the long-awaited tool in the Covid workbox that is sexier than masks and social distancing, and attended by high science and FedEx shipping technology. The huge majority of us know who should get vaccines first, and patiently wait our turns. More good.

 

The rest of Biden’s picks are a crayon box of colors and a mix of religions and places of origin, fulfilling a promise to make his staff look like America. Yes, people will try to sneak in the vaccine line and anti-vaxxers will demonstrate. Election denial and criticism will continue. But the feeling of what some are calling “normalcy” is palpable; the middle is pushing out the edges.

 

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