END OF CIVIL CONVERSATION IS OMINOUS

What I will always remember about 2020 is that the United States of America became an overtly split nation where the civil conversation that makes a group of people a nation, and not just factions, has broken down.

The political whiplash and conservative backlash that began to percolate in public with the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, the first Black president, and the Republican obstructionism that accompanied his presidency, became an outright volcanic political hostility toward anything progressive from 2016 to 2020. (Never before had a member of Congress broken all decorum and called the president a liar during his address to Congress as Republican Rep. Joe Wilson did to Obama in 2009.)

The racial divide in America was exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s mercurial policy decisions and inflammatory rhetoric — mostly by tweet. The Republican conservative view of reality split away from the American mainstream and tripped into a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news” and “deep state” conspiracy theories that culminated in Trump and his supporters denying the veracity of the same electoral system that elected all of the Republicans who won. Somehow, they said, the same votes and voters were not counted correctly for the president.

The second most memorable thing is that another side of America sided with justice. After 401 years of racial oppression, White Americans by the millions watched with their own eyes while a Black man was killed by the criminal injustice system of America. With conscience duly pricked by the energy released by the unfiltered and unspun public reaction to the prejudicial public execution of George Floyd, the unrelenting protests of the youth of every color of this nation pushed their parents and grandparents to act in ways Black people have been praying for for centuries.

Has America been fundamentally changed by these events? Only time will tell.

Honoré