For many, Jan. 20 was a day of disaffiliation. From our country, its leaders, politics and culture. For many, the election of President Donald Trump for a second time was more than a “wake-up call” or another blip in the ebbs and flows of American history.
For many of our peers, mentors, parents, friends and family, this Inauguration Day was a heartbreaking travesty of justice, a question of what it means to be free in mind and body, and perhaps most poignantly, a denunciation of the immense privilege of being American.
I do not recall feeling particularly moved by Trump’s election in 2016. I knew that my parents were unhappy, and that was enough to make me unhappy. We had watched “Good Morning America” every morning for as long as I could remember. Yet, on that morning, the screen was black and the room was silent as I ate a belVita biscuit for breakfast.
The first Trump years taught us how to internalize our differences to foment our divides. Differences in background, skin tone, gender and sexuality, yes, but also the polarized nature of our kindness.
Through his insults, vitriol and the obscenity of his opulence, Trump exploited a fundamental question at the heart of the American story: Should Americans, hailing from one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the history of the world, care?
From New Deal social safety nets to President Lyndon Johnson’s visions of a “Great Society” to ongoing progression toward making healthcare a right, not a privilege, with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the United States has a long history of putting Americans first. The politics of caring truly — about quality of life for ourselves and others around the world — have facilitated the nation’s greatest successes.
In 2020, Joe Biden spoke of a battle for the “soul” of our nation. If a president couldn’t bring us together, surely a pandemic, civil unrest and a longing for normalcy could. In 2020, Biden told us America was “back.”
Back to caring — about our fellow countrymen, our planet and those around the world with dreams of a better life in America. That there was a way to put Americans first without sacrificing our seat at the table.
After a failed insurrection and the beginning of a new era of American leadership, many thought Trump and the politics of carelessness were temporary fixations for the history books, a natural contrast to the giant leaps of politics past.
For four years, Biden spoke of the America that made those giant leaps — toward equality, opportunity and freedom for all who live here. He reminded us that this is the same country that came together, twice, to save the world from the grips of fascism and white supremacy.
The same country where you are free to love who you love. The same country that continues in earnest to cope and atone for its original sin of slavery. And indeed, the same country that elected to the highest office in the land a man named Barack Hussein Obama.
But today, the politics of carelessness and unkindness have been renewed. In a shocking repetition of history, America is back, as it seems, to debating the same issues that have torn us apart for the better part of the last decade.
Back to notions that those who are fortunate enough to win the lottery of being born American are somehow deserving and entitled. That the world’s problems are not America’s problems. And that if you just have the right friends that you, too, can be a leader of the free world.
The saying “all politics is local” seems to be from a bygone era of American politics, where disagreements were amicable and the issues were clear-cut. It is true, indeed, that the man associated with the saying, former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, was part of an American political ethos that held that criminal activity by a sitting president was a bipartisan issue. But the saying cannot be lost on us today.
The local politics of caring — about ourselves and one another in our fight to progress as a nation — will inevitably guide us to new successes. Not allowing for the politics of carelessness to stand in the way of being kind to those you meet in public, the cyclists you share the roads with, the barista that prepares your latte and even the guy you find yourself debating in the workplace or the classroom.
Because the politics of caring, as proven time and again by the nearly 250-year history of this nation (yes, Trump will oversee America’s semiquincentennial), will beat out the politics of carelessness in a country defined by its sense of a higher calling.
I do not know what to expect over the next four years. I do not know how our rights will be transformed. My heart aches for women and members of the LGBTQ community who feel targeted by vicious Republican campaigns. I ache, too, for undocumented Chicagoans, their friends and families who have been warned of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids this week, and for anyone who stands to be hurt from four more years of Trump.
But I cannot change these policies. I can only maintain the picture I carry of the America I love: the country that fights to keep democracy for Ukrainians, where the right to marry the person you love is codified, where you can choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it’s hard.
I can only carry with me a certain shamelessness of being American — I have nowhere else to go. It’s not a false sense of hope or optimism. It’s an unblemished image of the United States in its fight to become a more perfect union.
Aidan Klineman is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.