It’s like waking up after a long nightmare…while also realizing that elements from that bad dream do still exist and need to be addressed.

There’s the issue of accountability — for the insurrection and many other criminal acts. That has to be dealt with if there is to be any unity.

There’s the sheer number of white supremacists and sympathizers. How do you recognize a sympathizer? That’s the person who feigns offense at being lumped in with the bigots, yet continues to enable them. These are the “stand by your man” types. They don’t want to be called a racist, but they don’t want to fix racism either. Instead, the hold up Black Lives Matter and antifascist activists as a red herring.

What the previous administration showed us is both how little it takes to embolden white supremacists, and how unwilling most Republicans were to immediately and resolutely shun that behavior coming from their peers. In T&%^p’s last days, a few showed a whisper of morality by refusing to play along with the wannabe dictator’s agenda. With the upcoming Senate impeachment trial, there is another opportunity for folks to do the right thing: show that they value the health of democracy over the power trip of a former president.

Waking up from this, I hope the individuals who seem to seek out reasons to be angry, finally get it. You can nudge a moderate left. You can’t do a thing with a fascist in office except spend every last minute on damage control. Perhaps they have gained enough humility to see that an imperfect-yet-educated and measured politician is dramatically different from a tyrant operating like an insecure adolescent, who flares up over imagined slights, and understands next to nothing about the role he took an oath to fill.

Politics aside, you can suss out a lot about a candidate/politician by asking this question: do I believe this person genuinely cares about the well-being of the American people? Do I believe this person genuinely cares about his/her own family? If you want to try to test out, ask those questions about George W. Bush, and then ask them about T$%*p. One made many mistakes while making an effort; the other never even tried to do what was right for Americans.

Waking up from this, I hope the moderates — all those nice ladies who showed up to marches for the first time ever, wearing their pink hats and asking lots of questions in advance to ensure that the rally they would be attending would be a non-violent affair — I hope those folks hold on to the lessons they learned about speaking up and apply that to demanding more from their own party. We can say with confidence that we won’t have to take away President Biden‘s toys (i.e. remove him from Twitter), but that does not mean sitting back and going with the flow either.

After the honeymoon phase is over, those moderates who wrote letters and called their reps for the first time during the last administration, they should be ready to do the same again if the policies and laws are not meeting our standards.

But I will end with this: It’s important to enjoy the honeymoon. We have a woman serving as vice president. This is a huge step forward. Biden’s Cabinet is much more representative of the real America. The first two items — Covid-19 and Climate — on the White House website priorities page have centered science. Not a surprise, but refreshing to see after what we were fed by the Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief. The United States has rejoined the Paris climate agreement. The Inauguration presented mask wearing as the norm, not the exception. After the trauma of the last four years, enjoy that feeling of being able to sleep at night, knowing that the morning news won’t inform us that our president went on a nonsensical rant that has alienated and potentially endangered us. Breathe. Relax the shoulders. We have plenty of work to do, but we civilians can take a couple days off to purge the toxicity of the previous administration from our bodies.