Optimism despite overzealous D.C. shutdown
I badly wanted to head down to the National Mall in D.C. for the inauguration. Not to witness history, the reason I was there on Jan. 20, 2009 and again in 2017. This time it would mean a head start on the future.
Unfortunately, my daughter wouldn’t let me go. So I’ll just have to help launch the future from home.
Wherever we’re headed with Wednesday as Day One, it will start with a security lockdown within a pandemic lockdown — the double reason so few of us will see it in-person. The tens of thousands of friendly National Guard soldiers, about 300 of them from Connecticut, are needed and a fine sight to see in pictures.
Despite the ominous backdrop of dual lockdowns, I’m optimistic as the three sweeping crises of the last year reach a collective peak with the swearing-in of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
We have the transition itself, of course; the COVID-19 pandemic, which tragically reached 400,000 deaths Tuesday, double the high threshold President Donald Trump set for himself on March 29; and the rise of a multi-racial woman as vice president under a commander-inchief whose age makes him a good bet to give way to her within eight years, if not four.
In contrast to the National Guard presence, the security lockdown — all that barbed wire around the U.S. Capitol and the demarcation of a huge, no-go, red zone around the Mall — amounts to a less than optimistic view of America. It’s a massive overreaction led by the Secret Service.
You don’t close off cities, not for the level of threat indicated by the Jan. 6 mob siege of the Capitol and by the disorganized right-wing bands defending their leader, Trump. It raises the specter — no, the reality — of a once-great nation cutting freedom to its knees because of a few hundred thugs armed with bats and billy clubs.
That’s not only needless. It leads to overprotective overreactions like the Greenwich and Stamford public schools barring kids from watching this great national tradition on live TV due to the threat of violence. I’d say
25,000 military troops, plus more in waiting nearby, are more than capable of preventing mass violence.
That sad lockdown spectacle is possible only because of the coronavirus pandemic, in which common sense says crowds shouldn’t gather at the National Mall anyway. The security shutdown and the
400,000th death on Tuesday will be Trump’s final gift, four years to the minute after he promised, chillingly, “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.”
There was no surprise back then, not from my spot, pacing in a halfempty section of the crowd, several hundred yards from the new president. We all knew that was a clarion call for nationalist-driven battles. The travel ban from Muslim nations that Trump quickly ordered sealed any doubt.
What we didn’t know until 2020 was that “America First” would devolve so badly into a fight between personal freedom and community that we couldn’t put down a pandemic or extend our record 44 straight peaceful transitions of power. Amazing.
And yet, I’m optimistic because we will not see horrific violence on Wednesday; the transition to the Biden-Harris administration will move apace; we will return to civilized debates over policy rather than worrying about an unstable reality TV star and failed businessman at the helm; and the pandemic will subside, as we may finally be seeing the peak of it now.
Rough reckoning with race
Oh, I would have loved to be there for the transition. I implored my dear child, a music teacher in Massachusetts who said I was being selfish just by considering making the trip. I promised to clean up my room and sit up straight at the dinner table with no cellphone.
I told her, hey, I was at the 2017 inauguration and it was socially distanced, for sure. She wouldn’t relent.
She’s probably right. It’s a virtual world anyway and lurching into the future matters more than experiencing sights and sounds. Lurching is the key word here.
As optimistic as I am about where this inauguration might lead us, the trumped-up war over personal freedom, loosely part of the culture wars, carries on as Wednesday’s weird events unfold — in race, public health and security.
Just in case anyone thought the nation’s reckoning with race was making smooth progress, on Monday the White House issued a 45-page report from the “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission,” a reactionary manifesto designed to “restore or national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country” under the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
This is not satire. Coming on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday, it tried to drive a wedge between King’s ideals and efforts to bring racial justice and equity.
“Identity politics makes it less likely that racial reconciliation and healing can be attained by pursuing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream for America and upholding the highest ideals of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence,” the report said, after painting progressivism as a close cousin of fascism and communism.
‘A very natural reaction’
We will just have to watch the transition happen inside a cordoned-off war zone. I talked with a security expert, Amit Gavish of West Hartford, who described the logic behind it.
“It’s a very natural reaction,” said Gavish, a former deputy security chief for the prime minister of Israel, where he’s from. “Security is always a risk calculation exercise, always. You can’t shut down everything and be secure.”
He made it clear he isn’t privy to the intelligence that led to this shutdown, so he’s not judging the wisdom of it.
“After a traumatic event, the appetite to take a greater risk is diminished significantly because no one wants to be the one who’s going to make the judgment call to have a more lax security program during the inauguration,” said Gavish, CEO of SAOAS Enterprises.
Gavish went through the complex thinking behind various security measures — insider threats, the “design base” of any given threat, the timeline, location of key people and so forth. Bottom line: Maybe it could make sense to shut down a vast swath of the nation’s capital for one event, but I doubt it and I’m not sure the Secret Service and other authorities in charge in D.C. fully grasp the ironic optics of it.
Consider, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, London and other world capitals don’t shut down this way amid terrorism. Taken to its logical extreme, Gavish said, “You wouldn’t be able to run a country.”
We can run a country. And Wednesday, we return to an administration that does exactly that — a good reason for optimism.