Changing of the Guard: Does It Really Matter?
Joe Biden is going to become president. Betsy DeVos is out, and Miguel Cardona is in as Secretary of Education — and special education tuition reimbursement lives on. It may have felt tenuous at times over the last four years, but this “beast” is too big to slay. They can frustrate families. They can abuse families. They can disregard families on a case-by-case basis. But they can never replace this mechanism for ensuring a free and fair public education.
Of all the images I remember seeing in the last year, there is one, in particular, I want to highlight. It was a photograph of an elderly woman attending a protest with a sign reading, "I'm in my seventies and this is my first protest. Now do you get it?”
This woman lived through Jim Crow, the Vietnam War, the Stonewall Riots, the Oil Wars, the World Trade Organization, the housing crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter without realizing her civic responsibility to protest injustice. It took Trump —the most rapacious, corrupt, and flagrantly incompetent administration that America has ever encountered— to get her up and into the streets.
Joe Biden promised a return to the status quo. It is my fear that this will include a return to public apathy; that Americans will once again be content to ignore family separations, massive wealth inequality, systemic racism, abusive police, violent military imperialism, and all of the other charming injustices of daily life in the United States of America.
Unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden is at least capable of loving this country. Nevertheless, he loves a particular vision of this country — one that simply does not correspond with the reality we currently inhabit. I am under no illusions about what his election means. Joe Biden is not going to fundamentally change anything in a lasting way. He promised Wall Street that nothing would change, and when a politician makes a promise to Wall Street, you can be sure he intends to keep it.
Biden’s cabinet appointments thus far have been a slap in the face to the progressive movement. Biden’s election affords cover for everybody who wants to tell us that Trump was merely a one-off, a “whoops-a-daisy” slip into authoritarianism; that America and American imperialism are still a source of stability and, ultimately, good. Joe Biden will prop us up on the international stage, but he cannot heal the massive cracks that run through the very bedrock of American society. These cracks were first revealed to the average, complacent American liberal by the election of Donald Trump, but they have existed for a long, long time before that.
If you showed up to a protest in the last four years, even just one, I hope you understand that it is morally incumbent upon you to keep protesting until the actual problems are addressed. Don't accept a simple rebranding of the problems. It all reminds me of a joke I once saw on Twitter:
I’m fiscally conservative but socially very liberal. The problems are bad but their causes...their causes are very good.
@crushingbort
Marc Gottlieb
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