It's Been One Week...

..since Trump is no longer the President of the United States. 

A week ago yesterday was inauguration day. A week ago today was the first day in four years to wake up and not have Trump be president.

I talked about the feeling of relief and of a weight lifting in that moment of transition. 

And it's still there. 

Some.

There is still frustration that Trump is going to remain as a power in the Trumpublican party. That even the insurrection wasn't enough to shake him loose. That right now the Minority Leader from the House of Representatives is on his way to Florida to kiss the ring and bend the knee. To beg forgiveness for saying that the mob storming the Capitol was Trump's fault, because he, you know, told them to storm the Capitol. 

It's frustrating that we are going to get yet another unsatisfactory ending to an impeachment trial. It's frustrating that Trump and his team were able to stall off the emoluments cases against him until he left office so then the Supreme Court could say, well this is now moot so no case. It's frustrating that he will probably slime out of the cases in New York. Now, there has been no move on that front, but it just feels that it will happen that way, because it always does. Slime and slip and out he goes. 

I've seen on my more conservative friend's posts their friends and them talking about how Trump lives on as the bad guy in a liberal's dream. That we all have TDS and just can't get past him. 

And in a way they are right. 

There is a lot of focus on him. On why he's awful. Why he needed to be voted out of office. Why he needs to face some sort of punishment. 

But they should be glad for that focus. 

Because once you stop looking at Trump and as bad as he is, then you have to look at why he was voted in. Why his claims of voter fraud were so easily swallowed. Why Qanon even exists. Why the racists support him. Why he is still your party leader. And those questions have much harder answers.

Because that's you.

We then have to look at you and wonder what the hell happened. 

Now, to be fair, most of us have. We've looked at family and friends that we thought we knew and wondered how in the world that happened. How did the people that told us that God is Love and he who does not love does not know God were comfortable being told to hate? And not only told to but took to it really well. But we've tried to be sort of charitable. That this man, for whatever reason, held sway. He was charismatic enough in your eyes for you to think he was okay. We've all made bad judgement calls on people before so we tried to see that.

But...

If we stop focusing on him and see that it doesn't matter where he is you aren't backing away from what he was selling?

Well, that's you.

And we don't want that to be you. 

We want you to be the person we thought you were.

And I get it, you want us to not be the way we are either. You cannot understand how we got to be so intolerant. So rigid. So self righteous. We don't view ourselves like that, just like you don't view yourself as putting up with racists and extremists and holding hands with people who believe that Sandy Hook was faked, that the kids from Parkland deserve to be ridiculed for standing up for themselves, for being pissed that we adults still don't protect our kids from mass shootings. But if we take away our focus on him and put it on you we don't like that. 

You probably shouldn't either. 

It's not comfortable for any of us. These lenses we view each other through now. 

Biden wants to bring unity. I love that about him. I think it's a really noble cause. But his problem is going to be we don't want unity with each other. Not yet. I'm not sure what will bring about the shift, if anything can bring about the shift. 

It wasn't a global pandemic that would have had less disastrous effects if we had all worked together to make it better. That was quickly politicized and wearing a mask and staying at home somehow became a sign of weakness instead of compassion. Or maybe compassion is always thought of as weak by half of us. 

It wasn't an insurrection. An angry mob chanting to hang the Vice President. Focused and aimed by the sitting president. Oh sure, we got a day or so of "That's awful, that's not who we are!" but that was really hard to swallow so it quickly devolved into "what about them? those people!" and still not letting go of the Big Lie that lead up to it. That constant drum beat of voter fraud, of a stolen election. There wasn't and it wasn't. How do we reconcile with people who think our votes, just by way of not being like theirs, are fraudulent?

We are all still really angry. Maybe about different things, but we are angry. And I don't know how we stop.

So it's been one week...I'm not sure how long it will take until we say we're sorry.