Moving On

Moving On

I’m ready. I always liked that old adage, “I was born ready.” We have had a long twenty years as a nation. We are in our third major national crisis by my reckoning. I guess that since I have no military background and don’t have kids or relatives who have served in the various wars in the Middle East (Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan), I tend to think of the national crises as being the Tech Bust when the NASDAQ died in 2000, the Great Recession of 2007-2008, prompted by a housing crisis and concomitant mortgage melt-down, and now the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 with its 234,000 American deaths to-date, with God knows how much more pain yet to be suffered. In some ways, all three of those major national crises faded in terms of their daily impact on us more quickly than the lingering pain of the last four years of the era of Trump. This trauma has caused a bigger impact on our daily lives than any of us could have imagined. I’m cheating a bit since the pandemic and the last chapter of the era of Trump are meaningfully connected, but I still think that how I spend my day and what occupied my consciousness over 2020 was equally or more impacted by Trump than by COVID. And then, unlike any of those other events, the Trump era abruptly ended today with the announcement by the major media franchises that they were declaring Joe BIden to be the next President of the United States.

I think it is fair to suggest that we have all added another “where were you when you heard…” event to our repertoire of life events. Mine began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. I was in Mrs. Hunt’s fifth Grade classroom at the Spring Harbor Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. At the age of nine, I was well aware of who the President of the United States was. I had known since 1959 when my mother told me she wanted my haircut to mimic Jack Kennedy’s coif. I have a picture that attests to the attempt. I must be honest that by 1968 I was either too immune of too unaware to be shocked by the MLK and RFK assassinations. I do distinctly recall August, 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned. I was working at the Cornell Plantations arboretum for the summer and coaching seven-year-old little leaguers in the evening at Cass Park in Ithaca. I remember siting in my fraternity house living room watching Nixon read his resignation speech and thinking what a relief for those of us who had hated him and had suffered under the dual shadows of the Vietnam War and then the Watergate Scandal. The next moment of impact for me was the Challenger Disaster in January, 1986. I’m not sure why that was so much worse than the Apollo 1 fire disaster in 1967 or the near miss of Apollo XIII in 1970, but by 1986 I guess we thought the space program was too safe for disaster. When I heard, I was in the Japanese zen garden on the executive floor (17th) of the Bankers Trust headquarters on Park Avenue. I was a young 32-year-old Senior Vice President trying to solve the Latin American Debt Crisis for our bank by swapping our $4 billion of sovereign debt and the Chief Credit Officer, Joe Manganello and I were chatting when Phil Hampton, our boss, came out and told us.

The last big momentous moment was 911 in 2001. I had been in WTC 2 at 7:40am that morning and was on-stage at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, speaking at an IBM conference when at 9:05am the conference was stopped and we were all told to do whatever we each had to do. That was quite a moment given where I lived and worked and where I had been 105 minutes earlier. I had a kindergartener down on Bleaker Street with a classroom that looked out at the twin towers, so I had a lot on my mind that felt very close to home that morning.

This morning at 8:25am I was driving down into Escondido to pick up quail food for Kim and going to the First Republic Bank on Grand Street when I head the familiar ping of a text on my iPhone. It was Kim and she was texting the exciting news that CNN and NBC had called the election for Biden/Harris by virtue of calling the Pennsylvania vote count finished and conclusive. I was driving my Tesla so I was listening to streaming Homeward Bound music and not listening to MSNBC, which I would have in the Mercedes on Sirius Radio. Kim was screaming and crying for joy. I called each of my children and several friends and they had all gotten the news within moments of me. It felt like a monumental relief after all the waiting. We had waited for a week of votes, for eighteen months of primaries and pseudo-conventions and for four endless years of disgust and pain with the actions, inactions, lies and sycophantic enabling of Donald Trump and a disappointing array of Republican lawmakers. We have come to know and despise not only Donald, Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, Melania, and Jared, but also Kellyanne, Steven Miller, Hope Hicks, Kayleigh McEnany, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, William Barr, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and so many more. Some we will see more of and some we will never see any more, but the relevance of Donald J. Trump will never again overshadow our and the rest of the worlds’ lives the same way they have. America is moving on and doing so with the sound of rejoicing. This has to be what America felt like on VE and VJ Day. I imagine there is a photographer in Times Square who thinks he may have captured the equivalent of the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of the random sailor kissing a dental assistant with the passion of a nation ending a horrible war. Already the sound of the bells peeling in Paris this morning have created a sense of relief that brings us all to tears. We need to move on right after we let off a bit more steam.

I suspect that this reaction of relief has an enhanced feeling to it due to the Coronavirus and the fact that we have all been on tenterhooks for all of 2020, being unable to feel joyous about much of anything. But that is nonetheless an appropriate response given the direct and dastardly role played in the COVID crisis by Donald Trump. Everything that we all consider the worst of human nature, Donald Trump has managed to display and indeed embody. So let us all rejoice in this important and relieving victory and as they like to say about the Holocaust, let us never forget about how shamefully we allowed our lesser angels to lead us for far too long and down a near-disastrous path. We all need to look forward and start moving on starting tomorrow morning.