Better Stuff

We are embarked on the first full week of better stuff from Washington. It's important because half our family lives within a couple of miles of our nation's besieged Capitol Building, where much more than sausages are made.

The first week of the Biden Administration gives real hope of better days to come, which was part of every good global citizen's hope for the young year. The administration of he whose name we no longer need mention has all but imploded. The loyalty to it that still festers around the country is somewhat frightening but, I believe, fading fast.

The acts that led to the January 6 mob assault on the Capitol will haunt us for weeks, months and possibly years to come, but the focus must be on health, safety, a more equitable society and better government. Joseph R. Biden, a man of my generation and the only president with whom I have had personal contact, turns out to be the best president for the moment.

So far, he's doing nearly everything right. The best-prepared president of our lifetime has replaced the least prepared and the worst human being ever to inhabit the Oval Office.

We knew he was bad. We knew he was the worst. We knew he was abusing the body politic and endangering global progress in so many ways. We even suspected he might not go willingly. But I don't think anyone really expected that he would be an outright traitor to democracy, trying by all means possible and impossible to overturn the results of an American election.

Even more, who would ever have thought that a majority of Republicans would support his de facto coup attempt even after it failed so miserably, even after the mob.

For four years, I have been preoccupied with disappointment, anger and angst. As a retired international journalist who worked 15 years in Washington, I am admittedly still a bit obsessed with things over which I have no control or with which I have no legitimate role.

My favorite image for the moment is the House impeachment prosecutors marching through the "scene of the crime," the Capitol Rotunda, to deliver the charges to the U.S. Senate.

(Pulitzer-worthy Photo by Hannah Gaber USA Today)

I now love my president and my country, and it's definitely time to focus more on family and to seek real end-game triumph in these times of challenge.

I'll try, but no promises I won't occasionally lapse into long-held frustrations. In other words, I'll still have MSNBC as a video soundtrack and I'll still be a Mormon, fake Filipino and American living in Paradise with a better lover, family and friends than I have ever deserved.