What happened over the last four years was _______________.

Here's the question hanging over Inauguration Day: What happened?  This is a fill-in the blank question.  What happened over the last four years was _____________.  

There are lots of answers bouncing around and you guess is as good as any.

My feeling over the last six months or so was that we were victims of domestic violence, locked in with our abuser who launched violent attacks on our humanity, while denying us succor for our most urgent needs for health care and disaster relief.  

The sudden quiet from the silencing of Trump's Twitter account has been a great relief.  Someone was quoted as saying it was a like a car alarm -- you can ignore it for the first hour, but then it gets incredibly irritating.  I have a neighbor whose car alarm goes off from time to time.  It takes a few moments to realize it's stopped, so that the relief settles in slowly but expands to fill my whole body -- I am feeling that now, relieved of Twitter attacks on any and everybody.

I am glad we elected Joe Biden because I don't think he'll attack anybody.  What a relief!  

But of course now we are back to the baseline of all the inequalities and abuse embedded in American Jim Crow capitalism.  Not exactly a happy baseline, which is part of the reason some people got so mad they voted for Trump, and some people just didn't vote, and some of us voted but complained bitterly.

As Reverend Dr. William Barber said on election night, "Whoever wins tonight, there will still 140 million poor and low wealth in the United States tomorrow."  

I'm ready to keep fighting AND it is really lovely that the car alarm has been shut off.