With Apologies to Sam, Toby & Will: Joe's Inaugural Address

 Mr. Chief Justice, Madam Speaker, Senators, Congressfolk, My fellow Countrymen:

This is a day, as Roosevelt said, of national consecration. 

We face today a stricken nation. Our distress owes to two phenomena, one natural and one of our own making.

The natural cause is a virus. Not a virus made by man. It arose in no science fiction laboratory in China, but was carried in bats and overflowed into mankind, the fault neither of the bat nor of man.

The second phenomenon was of our own making, or of the invention of disturbed or confused or fearful minds: The evasion of hard, cold reality and cowardly retreat into fantasy, a flight to the land of make believe and conspiracy and darkness.

We have found that we can live in worlds of our own imagination for only so long until reality intrudes and asserts itself. In the past this reality has come in the form of war, military attack or, as in this case, of epidemic disease. Once reality arrives, our need for real action, for science, for cooperation, and for, yes, for government to light the black night of error and mendacity becomes clear.

Our descent into the mad world of dismantling our government left us ill prepared to face reality. The libertarian view that we do not need government, that government is not the solution but the problem always crashes on the hard boulders of public health, public defense or economic disaster. 

My predecessor in this office did not invent the idea that government is necessarily bad, that we should shrink government to a size where we can drown it in a bathtub, but efforts to destroy the departments of government responsible for data collection, (the Department of Commerce,) to destroy the department responsible for science, (the Department of Agriculture,) to destroy the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, all vital to our safety and prosperity as a nation, have made matters much worse than they had to be.

If I read the results of this election clearly, what I am being asked to do is to restore these vital agencies to their full power.

Our distress comes from no failure of ourselves. And our distress did not begin with the pandemic.

Our distress arose because we lost faith in each other, and we lost faith in the fairness of the American way.  Too many people in too many counties came to believe they had been dealt a loser's hand, systematically, and the deck was stacked against them.  What they have come to believe is meritocracy is a fraud. They were constantly reminded if they worked hard, played by the rules, they would be rewarded, but they found themselves on the losing end and they were shamed into believing it was their own fault.

They were sold that canard that the value of their jobs could be measured in dollars. They watched as American companies moved their jobs to nations where workers were valued only as pieces of machinery. The false god of material wealth as the standard of success walked hand in hand with false god of an aristocracy of elite colleges as the defining prize of entry into the upper classes. 

We have learned in this pandemic who really are the "essential workers." Nurses, grocery store workers, sanitation workers, hospital attendants, electricians, HVAC workers, plumbers, mechanics, information technology geeks, construction workers must be in place and thriving before the doctor, lawyer, professor, stock broker or businessman can even begin to work.

We need first to restore science, government and organization to our society, and only then can we get our population vaccinated, our children back to school and our factories and restaurants open. Only then, can we begin to travel, to fly, to reconnect.

Once we have accomplished this, our economy and our long nightmare of isolation and paralysis will recede. 

When that happens, we can take stock. We can look at reality and real facts, not "alternative facts" in the face and we can know, once again that children really did die at Sandy Hook, that a policeman's knee really did kill a defenseless Black man and that the reaction to this, while it ultimately was marred and besmirched by violence, was understandable.

And once the dark curtain of pestilence has been lifted, we must not forget how it was dropped in the first place. We must not forget that every state has, between it's gleaming and energetic metropolises, too much decaying and disintegrating rural space, too long out of sight and out of mind.  We must turn our Rust Belt back into a thriving heartland. 

We must turn our energies and our money toward vitalizing our rural areas as we once decided to embark on rural electrification. We must bring the farmland and the "empty spaces" into the heart of our national life. We can no longer be content to ignore or denigrate "fly over country" or to dismiss the poor Southern states as lost causes, or characterize the Mountain West as white nationalist country. There are millions who live in these places who, though outnumbered, voted for change, voted for progress.

We do not face a financial crisis from a corrupt banking system; we do not face a Great Depression with origins in a  degenerate economic order and colonialism. Our challenge, in fact, has already been met by the most innovative and successful scientific triumph since the polio vaccine. 

We can and we will charge ahead, distribute the vaccine, maintaining our masks and our distance for only as long as is necessary and then we can emerge from the dark into that sunny plain of honesty, of mutual respect and of, finally, unity, so that we can once again speak of the "United" States of America with real belief and not irony. 

We can be that country which has time and again come together, as people from different places, rural and city, wealthy and poor, North and South, East and West, coastal and inland, realize we are all Americans, so much more like each other than different from each other and we can know in the words of that old song, 

"We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun,

We'll put it together and we'll get it undone,

We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun,

When the world is much brighter."

Thank you and God bless the UNITED States of America.