We have quite a few in Wisconsin, too-some recently elected, and many just now throwing their names into races across the state.
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I am also excited for the new class of progressive, smart, energetic elected officials who, more and more, truly represent the country as it is and will be, and not what it was for too long. I look forward to calling out Biden and his party when they fall short (and they will). I look forward to at least two years of Democrats not just undoing his administration’s draconian and cruel policies, but enacting new, more humane, based-in-reality laws and programs. He was just a symptom of an already extant disease in our body politic, yes, but it still feels real good to see him gone. To do better.įuck Trump and all who aided and abetted him forever and ever. To make space for a national mourning and reckoning.
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Still, I’m counting today as Day One, because the inauguration is a welcome and important opportunity for our country to take a long-held breath and reset. The Biden/Harris Administration isn’t going to magically end the pandemic or right all the many wrongs of our world. It seemed useless, to be honest, to attempt to quantify something that had become such an everyday, unrelenting trauma. I stopped counting around day 150, I think. It’s a little less than a year later and we’re just about to top 400,000 deaths nationally and 6,000 deaths in Wisconsin. Reading those old journal entries, though, I can tell how impossible it was to fully comprehend the scale of what was happening. I counted up the days of quarantine, noting early on that I imagined we were in for the long-haul because there was no way the Trump Administration wasn’t going to be as terrible as possible. In the midst of the whirlwind of grief and funeral arrangements, this virus suddenly became our world, too. The funeral happened when gatherings were limited to 50 people. My partner’s father had died in hospice just days before it would have been impossible for us to be with him in his final hours, or to hold any kind of service. I started counting the days in my journal entries last March, when the virus began to close in and the governor issued the first orders to limit gatherings.