There are Two Choices

Watched the inauguration and just finished enjoying the Celebrating America Show.  It was a festival of joy celebrating all America. Artists of all genres and traditions performed and celebrated the great Americans, average Americans who have been working to feed, heal, and serve our nation.

We have two choices.  We can embrace the good.  We can embrace our diversity.  We can embrace the work and service we need to conduct to bring our nation back. We can embrace the peoples and other nations of the world as we share the planet with the fellowship of humanity and our will is not supreme.

Or we can be the mob, embracing grievance, embracing violence, brandishing symbols of hatred past and present.

I am choosing the America I watched tonight, where the various hues of our cultural mosaic were on display and celebrated.  I am choosing the America where Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Obama, political opponents, stood together pledging to work together to rebuild America.  I am choosing an America that celebrates the poet, today a supremely eloquent young woman whose beautiful call inspired those of us listening.  I am choosing an America where the worker, the nurse, the teacher matter as much as the rich and powerful who have been served so fully these past four years.  


We all face this choice.  I am a pessimistic person by nature and realize that the future is not ensured.  I have met too many sympathetic to the mob to work under any illusions that this will be easy or that they will join our celebration and work in unity. But, the choice remains and what you choose will define whether this experiment in government of, for, and by its people will be renewed or will perish from the Earth.  Choose wisely and kindly.





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