The nightmare is over. After four years of alternating sadness, incredulity, disbelief, rage and hopelessness, the suffering caused by the departing president and his enablers is finally behind us. All this time, he was a living showcase of the worst possible human defects, a long list of ethical, moral, social, and intellectual shortcomings or, in most cases, downright absences.
That he is such a terrible example of a human being is not an issue in itself. Many like him are all around us, and we are prepared to co-exist with such people. Very few though accumulate such a complete list of distorted, unethical behaviors, and none of those few got elected before to serve as the United States president. For this we were not prepared, so the merry-go-round of obscure sentiments during these past four years was almost unbearable. At least it was for me, and I’m sure it was for so many of us.
Be as it may, the nightmare is now truly over. No more daily proud displays of disrespect for people, for norms, for common sense. No more deliberate disregard for life and a better, fairer future. No more utter ugliness in acts and words and attitude. No more gratuitous attacks, no more absurd lies. It’s time to live and love with abandon, without fear. It’s time to feel hopeful again.
We now have a few years ahead of us to rebuild what was destroyed and revert the damage caused by one of the worst leaders in modern history. There’s certainly a lot of hard work to be done and many difficult tasks ahead of us. The most important of them will be to forever understand and be reminded of what brought us so close to civil disaster. By doing so, we may learn how to avoid getting there again four years down the road. Godspeed, America.
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