An American democracy day! Inauguration day in 2021

President Joe Biden's important healing inauguration address.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/01/20/inaugural-address-by-president-joseph-r-biden-jr/

This is America’s day. This is democracy’s day. 

A day of history and hope.

An echo opinion published in the Arkansas Daily Gazette !

By Dana Kelley

Kelly wrote:  I agree with what President Joe Biden said in his inaugural address.

In fact, when President Biden said, "...hear me clearly, disagreement must not lead to disunion." Indeed, that's prudent advice.

"We can treat each other with dignity and respect," said President Biden, imploring that we "stop the shouting and lower the temperature." Good words, which unfortunately may fall on deaf ears to millions of the (IMO "cult") Trump voters, who remember the superheated shrieking of Democrats at the 2017, inauguration that promised to not stop until Trump was impeached and cast out.

(IMO, Maine Writer......with due cause!)

"Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury," he said, "no progress, only exhausting outrage." Those are indeed the predictable outcomes when incessant disunion, denial and delegitimizing propaganda were launched like missiles against the president in 2016, who, incidentally, had an Electoral College margin of victory larger than Joe Biden's.

Respect!

"Show respect to one another," he urged. "Politics doesn't have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path." I'm right with Biden there, and what a difference it might have made had those sentiments prevailed with not-my-president/Never Trumpers who never respected his election, were insultingly disrespectful of him personally and promised scorched-earth opposition to his policies.

As he said in his speech on Wednesday, "We have to be better than this," and he's right. 

There's little doubt that restoring the good-faith unity Biden wants now would be good for our nation, but it's going to be a tough sell without first walking back the bad-faith disunity of the past four years.

The inaugural speech wasn't the time for doing so, of course. Inaugurations are forward-looking occasions, and it was welcoming to hear President Biden reach out to those who didn't support him, and "take a measure of me and my heart."

After the swearing-in pageantry all cloaked with its rah-rah rhetoric of unity in the abstract sense, however, Biden's busy first day included issuing more than a dozen executive orders--some involving subjects where there is acrimonious disunity--as if he had received a mandate. 

Democrats edged to a tie in the closest of races in the Senate, and lost ground in the House.

If the goal is to unify people, why not start with truly common-ground issues? The scourge of crime is most felt by the nation's poorest neighborhoods and residents; building on Trump's track record of reduced criminal violence would be universally popular.

Likewise with continuing to study and seek remedies for the national travesty of high-cost urban public schools that fail to teach throngs of students. Everybody wants better education.

Perhaps he will be a one-term president, due to age, but Biden has a real opportunity to lead on bipartisan overtures necessary to restore a greater degree of unity.

It would be a worthy legacy, if he can do it.