The Inauguration Set Me Free

I didn’t expect to weep. I know I’ve been stressed, mostly due to the pandemic, I thought. But watching the inauguration, I started to cry and realized that four years of Trump had taken its toll on my soul. The chaos, cruelty, greed, and lack of basic decency and empathy made every day, every tweet, every anxious checking of the day’s news an agony. It was a burden to which I had become so accustomed that its weight and the pain it caused became part of my life.

Watching Kamala Harris take the oath touched me the same way as the Grant Park rally celebrating Obama’s 2008 victory. I felt hope and change once again. I was proud as a woman to hear Harris addressed as Madam Vice President. I wept as Lady Gaga sang a heartfelt version of our National Anthem, a song that has sometimes filled me with shame and despair. I cried as Jennifer Lopez belted out a medley of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land and America the Beautiful. I sighed when Garth Brooks sang Amazing Grace, remembering President Obama singing it at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was killed, along with eight others, by a white nationalist in a shooting at a Charleston church.

When President Biden took the oath of office, more tears. I knew I was worried something bad could happen, despite the massive security. To hear him deliver a presidential inaugural address filled with hope and love and unity allowed me to lay down the heavy burden I had been carrying since Trump’s campaign and victory over four years ago. His words replaced the vulgar hatred displayed in the attempt to overthrow our government just two weeks ago. Yes, I know QAnon and the Proud Boys are still out there, but read some of the words of our new President, a man of decency, honor, faith, compassion, and empathy for the suffering his fellow Americans:

In another January, on New Year’s Day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper, the president said, and I quote, “if my name ever goes down into…