THE BURDEN AND THE GLORY: JOE BIDEN’S PRESIDENCY
EVEN HORRID COVID COULDN’T QUITE DAMPEN THE SPIRIT OF HEALING I found it full of hope and a sense of decency seldom seen in powerful leaders of powerful nations; those racial bigots and religious extremists, totalitarian dictators, we see daily on our TV
Satendra Nandan is Fiji’s leading writer. His book GIRMIT: Epic Lives in Small Lines was published last year. His new book, LIFE journeys: Love &
Grief, will be published later this year. He’s currently working on a book on Mahatma Gandhi for Australasian readers at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Barton Campus, ACT.
Between a 78-year-old President and a 22-year-old poet, a new world echoed on January 20, 2021 – A brightness at noon.
Hope and history, restoration and renewal of the wounded soul of a nation, came into being; something fresh was being born,in white and black, in the voices of a man and a woman, old and young.
New hope
The hope of politics and poetry came
together on Capitol Hill in Washington DC,on a dark and dreary winter’s morning.
One felt relieved, happy to see so much happening in a place so violently desecrated on January 6, under the shadow of a vile loser.
Fortunately he was not seen in the precincts of the Capitol Hill.
It was, as Joe Biden, the 46th President, proclaimed was America’s Day, and a momentous day for democracy. And so it was, thank God.
His words, his faith, expressed in the simplest language without any rhetorical flashes touched millions within and beyond the shores of the USA. I felt a new dawn breaking as this decent, melancholy man, stood to take his oath and deliver his Honest Abe speech, surrounded by leafless trees and masked men and women, with armed national guards carrying terrifying weapons.
A terrified consciousness seemed to have enveloped the inaugural occasion like a fog of fear. But words of sincerity cleared the day.
Even horrid COVID couldn’t quite dampen the spirit of healing and renewal in the voice of this most genuine and decent of men with such enormous power for goodness and freedom where ,once again, the head can be held high, and the mind is without fear.
Poetic reflection
The newly anointed President is a man touched by personal tragedies that would have demolished a lesser human being.
But the Irish, like many peoples of our region and elsewhere, have known tragedies of immense sorrows, hence their poetry of the sorrowful heart that strengthens the mind.
Irish literature, President Biden’s ancestral inheritance, is a glory of human
imagination and creativity in a foreign language.
This was best summed by the young poet who expressed a nation’s onward journey through the image of climbing the hills of the hurts of history and swimming through the waves of adversity with the audacity of hope. Her words echoed in many hearts. After all, we’re all climbing our hills of joy and buffeting waves of sorrows daily.
And once we realise that this is the shared experience of being human, perhaps we feel less burdened by our own despairs.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, forgive and forge our shared fate. A whole year has vanished in uncertainties and our vulnerabilities. Only Mr Donald J Trump provided some comic relief though one was aware of the invisible tragedy and the subterranean fear that lurked beneath every lie he told.
One felt the world was sick and the sickening sights on television were so overwhelming that one was forced to switch off the television.
Human beings cannot bear too much reality.
I found some consolation in literature and in the lives of a few people. Love was healing and grief gave glory to the sad narrative in which I, too, am a small link.
In all this, the quiet voice of Joe Biden was reassuring. Here was a man of my generation, who emanated a new light through his undramatic words and that inimitable smile that only a anguished soul can give to a suffering world.
I found it full of hope and a sense of decency seldom seen in powerful leaders of powerful nations; those racial bigots and religious extremists, totalitarian dictators, we see daily on our TV screens imprisoning innocent people of many professions.
It’s here America generally has been a shining beacon for so many – often it has been the voice of concern, if not the voice of our conscience.
This is the essential quality of the soul of a nation. The awareness of the pain of others goes deep in shaping our souls: it’s hammered on the anvil of agony for a nation too.
President’s tasks and challenges
President Biden’s tasks are many. His challenges will be numerous, but he has some remarkable colleagues in the Senate where he spent almost 40 years and the talented multilayered, multiracial administration he has gathered together, representing the magnificent mosaic of America. Besides he has two remarkable women close to him – Dr Jill Biden, his wife for 43 years and Kamala Harris, the first woman elected to this high office, just a breath away from the presidency itself.
Doubtless these two empathetic women of substance will bring the feminine principle into action on many decisions.
COVID-19, climate crisis, racism in the US, health care, inequality and iniquity of a system that seems integral to a society’s original sins, the evangelical madness that seems to lead to religious frenzy in two of our cherished democracies: the greatest and the largest,are part of world history. How these two nations function in a broken world may determine this century’s development from the Atlantic to the South Pacific.
Barack Obama has just written A Promised Land. Joe Biden was his vice-President for eight years.
Now he becomes the President, full of promise.