On inauguration day, I imagine…
Four years without worrying that the White House will create new rules that target me as a gay person and my friends as transgender people…
Four years where the President won’t fly from rally to rally making comments he well knows will stoke racism and sexism and xenophobia…
Four years where religious minorities will again be welcome in a nation that enshrined the separation of church and state into its Bill of Rights…
Four years in which immigration, without which the nation would not exist and could not survive, is no longer inherently treated as criminal…
Four years of science not being a dirty word but instead elevated to help us combat crises…
Four years in which Black communities are not targeted for voter suppression…
Four years in which dictators are not praised and love-letters do not fly between the White House and strongmen…
Four years when the White House cabinet and staff and even the interns will look even more as diverse my own home or more…
Four years where we once again care about our connections to the rest of the world…
Four years in which the President isn’t on social media at 3 am attacking anyone…
Four years where mockery isn’t the true oxygen of the presidency…
Four years in which the presidency isn’t a cult of personality, in which the president isn’t the only news, or the only American who seems to matter.
To be sure, it will also be four years of imperfection, errors, swings and misses, challenges, difficulty, and even failings.
But for four years I won’t doubt that the person leading us cares as deeply about country as personal fortune.
I imagine four years where, some days, I — we — get to breathe out.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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