Safe!

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Baseball has a well-known signal for “safe!” When a runner slides into a base before the ball reaches the baseman’s mitt, the umpire squats, put his arms forward and sweeps them to his sides. The runner and his team’s fans know he can stay in play and advance.

A movie (whose name I forget) once used baseball’s “safe!” sign in an amorous context. A male suitor gave it to his date, who had slipped inside her front door without a goodnight kiss. The gesture, seen through a window, brought a smile to her face and the promise of love.

All this passed through my mind last night as I lay down to sleep. After watching the Inauguration, my wife and I had driven forty minutes each way to get our first shot of the Moderna vaccine. In about two weeks, when immunity starts to kick in, we’ll be partially safe. In six weeks, when the immunity from our second shot kicks in, we’ll be 95% protected.

We know we’ll still have to take precautions, both to keep others safe and because no one knows how long the immunity lasts. But we’re on our way back to something resembling pre-pandemic life. We’re not safe now, but we will be relatively safe relatively soon.

Last night’s unaccustomed feeling of safety was about far more than our vaccinations. It was mostly about our nation and our way of life. The Inauguration of President Biden and Vice-President Harris had delivered us and the country we love from madness.

Spooked by the Capitol Insurrection, my wife and I had waited until both were safely ensconced in the White House to heave our final sighs of relief. Good government was on the way. Along with it were not just vaccines, but a federal mask mandate, an honest regime of non-vaccine measures, pandemic relief, infrastructure building, a full-court press against systemic racism, concerted action against climate change, and an attempt to do something about the 11 million instantly-deportable serfs among us.

All of a sudden, our leaders were going to address all these longstanding horrible problems as if they were rational adults.

Safety had not been big on the last president’s agenda. He had made his short political career by making people feel unsafe. He had demonized self-interested China as fiercely inimical and bent on global economic conquest. (Aren’t we all self-interested?). He had jet-propelled the GOP’s canard of an imaginary, nationwide putsch to wipe out Christianity. He made up a “cancel” culture supposedly crushing free speech, and a series of concocted “witch-hunts” against himself. (Who could imagine why anyone might investigate him?)

Last but not least, our last president had relentlessly overhyped the threat of Black Lives Matter and antifa protests, a very few of which had produced some minor property damage and some fires to replay in endless loops on right-wing news. The only deaths I’m aware of were of Black people killed by police, an innocent woman run over in Charleston, a person killed by a seventeen-year-old right-wing gun fanatic in the Pacific Northwest, and the five people who died as a result of the Capitol Insurrection.

Most of all, the last president—I’m trying never to use his name again—made us actually unsafe with his lies, incompetence, neglect and occasional outright craziness. Bleach to drink, anyone? Hydroxychloroquine? Let’s all throw off our masks and party for “freedom” so we can infect each other as quickly as possible! And let’s not get vaccinated because vaccines are produced by a horrible cabal backed by the Dems that wants to control our lives and our minds!

For those of us still in contact with reality, having a top leader who daily propagates such craziness, along with over 30,573 lies lies, didn’t do much for feelings of safety.

Imagine boarding an airplane, belting in, and hearing the doors close. The pilot comes on the intercom. He announces that this is his maiden solo flight, and that everyone’s going to Mars.

That’s how the whole last four years felt. A man who had had no experience whatsoever in elective office, whose family company of less than thirty people had experienced several bankruptcies, was suddenly in charge of a highly specialized federal workforce of some seven to nine million people.

The more he lied and made things up, and the less he read his briefing papers and consulted experts, the more self-evident it became that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. But he sure knew how to delude people and rile them up.

With 47 years of experience in elective office, Joe Biden is the most-qualified president in this century or the last, except perhaps for FDR in the later of his four terms. Like his mentor Obama, Biden is humble, cautious, careful and empathetic. Now, at last, a majority of us seem to recognize the importance of experience and these other qualities, along with competence, knowledge and solid contact with reality.

One of the most marvelous aspects of our newfound safety is how Black people helped provide it. Jim Clyburn, our House Majority Whip, is not the world’s best orator. But he has something more important for real leadership: wisdom and good judgment. By anointing Biden in South Carolina, Clyburn put Biden in the national limelight and on the road to victory, which we all see now was narrow and fraught with peril.

So the nation owes Clyburn a debt of eternal gratitude. Our democracy would not have survived the demagogue’s second term. Clyburn pointed out the safest escape route. After a tense primary-election season and a lot of nail biting, we took it, and it worked.

Helping hands across the race divide also came from Georgia, whose runoffs swept away Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader. While not quite the devil of the last president, McConnell had become infamous. With his iron hand suffocating every Senate floor vote, he pulled back almost every helping hand for working people in need that Democrats could imagine, even those that had some GOP support. You could almost hear his arteries hardening as his lifeless voice intoned the latest “no” to votes for anything but confirming judges who pine for the nineteenth century.

Who made it possible to sweep McConnell away? It was Black and Latino organizers in Georgia, that’s who. It was people like Stacey Abrams, Nsé Ufot, Helen Butler, and Marisa Franco. Nothing like a helping hand pulling you out from in front of the bus to improve inter-racial understanding.

As we all enjoy our new and unaccustomed sense of safety and common purpose, we can’t relax just yet. Of course we have enormous work to do. But we also have a vital enigma to solve.

How did we ever come so close to the edge? What put 75 million voters, and the leaders of a once-great political party, in thrall to a carnival barker, pathological liar, charlatan, inciter of an insurrection and con-man? How did one-quarter of our entire population not see through him from the start? Did we skip a whole generation of parents who teach their kids that it does no good to praise yourself, and that people who do so incessantly are unreliable?

I may have been lucky. I met a pathological liar in my twenties, while in Sweden on a post-college summer trip before grad school. While still in my twenties, I had a brilliant and charming con-man for a boss, who brought his small company that employed me down. A company “doctor” warned me of his dishonesty while interviewing me to find out what had gone wrong. So I learned early to spot both types—the patho and the con-man.

Once you learn that, you become inoculated. Yet pathological liars and gifted con-men aren’t so common. They’re even less common when combined into a single person like the last president. I passed the whole rest of my 75 years without encountering anyone remotely similar in my personal life.

Fortunately, my early inoculation, unlike the Moderna vaccine, seems to have given me lifelong immunity. Once burned, I didn’t have much trouble seeing what lay behind the last four years of chaotic misrule.

Maybe we need more universal inoculation. Maybe we can improve our public education so that everyone can identify the patho and the con-man. Maybe we can find the types in literature and teach them better. Maybe we can somehow bar such people from politics at the entry level. If we could do either, our nation’s and species’ chances of survival would take a giant leap.

Yet today, it’s enough to revel in our new-found feelings of safety. For the first time in four years, we have a government based on experience, knowledge, competence, facts and evidence. We have top leaders who care about us, not just their own reality “show.” We all owe a current debt to Black leaders and voters that needs repaying. (Reparations are a subject for another day.) We have resurrected the notion of public service from the dead.

For a few days, we can leave the big plans to our new leaders. We can celebrate our newfound feelings of safety, commonality and budding confidence, as the hard work begins.

Endnote: Winding Down this Blog. Now that we have rational, competent government again, I’m going to wind down this blog. I’ll still be writing, but no longer to the tune of several posts a week. Just as happened after Obama’s first inauguration [scroll down to last paragraph], I’m going to put my trust in good, experienced, competent men and women, most of whom have worked diligently for decades to win the opportunity to serve us.

In a bizarre way, this last election-season push has been hectic and exciting. But it’s nice to feel safe at last—as much as one can after a grotesquely botched response to a global pandemic and four years of mindless, whim-driven chaos.

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