The day the walls came down

Did you see the shots today of President Biden and his wife and Vice President Harris and her husband walking up to the north front of the White House from their Inaugural stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue?

You could see the White House for the first time in months because the 10-foot high “non-scalable” wall that Trump had erected around the place had been taken down.  For at least the last six months, the White House has been surrounded by that wall, and by a whole maze of fences, barricades, traffic barriers and bollards that turned what they used to call “the people’s house” into a walled fortress.  Trump began building his wall at the time of the first Black Lives Matter protests last summer and continued the fortification of the White House into the fall until the place was completely surrounded by some three miles of barriers.

Well, they took down Trump’s wall on this day, Joe Biden’s first day as president, putting the White House back on public view.

Didn’t today feel like the day the Berlin wall came down?  I mean, we have been divided like Berlin was divided, by a political wall between red and blue states, between Republicans and Democrats in Congress and in state houses across the land, by a wall between what is real and what is not real, what are facts and what are lies, a wall between the races and between citizens and non-citizens, a wall between democracy and a new totalitarianism, a wall in the end between those who hate and those who are tolerant and love this country.

The wall came down today in Biden’s inaugural speech.  He spoke of unity and togetherness and citizenship and tore down the wall of words erected in his predecessor’s inauguraal about carnage and crime and disorder. 

There have been walls between us as Americans for far too long.  President Biden singled out institutional racism today as one of the walls he will work to tear down, alongside the walls of poverty and ill health and gender and sexual identity. 

Wasn’t it great to see the White House in all its splendor again?  It was so great to see Biden in the Oval Office chipping away at the walls Trump built by signing executive orders ending the Muslim ban, halting construction of the wall on our Southern border, ending discrimination against LGBTQ Americans in federal hiring, reversing the order to stop counting non-citizens in the census, and stopping construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and ending oil and gas exploration in national monuments, and rejoining both the Paris climate accord and the WHO.

There are more walls that need to come down.  Some are Trump walls and some pre-date him by decades, even centuries.  But Joe Biden gave those walls a hell of a hit with the sledgehammer of his experience and his decency today. He returned the White House to the American people, and that’s a good start.