January 20, 2021. It’s a new day.

I watched as the former president left the White House and made his way to a send off ceremony at Joint Base Andrews featuring Journey’s song “Don’t Stop Believing”, a thin military band rendition of “Hail to the Chief”, and an extravagant 21-gun salute. I listened to his remarks, a recasting of Trump’s Greatest Hits. I watched as he climbed the stairs to Airforce One for the last time and waived goodbye.

Then, I took a deep breath.

I have not hidden my feelings about President Trump. I shared my thoughts here, on social media, and locally, and those thoughts were as follows: Some modicum of character, integrity, and humility matter in the office of the presidency. And as I saw it, this made President Trump uniquely unqualified. And now, five years later, we’ve seen the fallout. Were there some successes by this President along the way? Yes. To say otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. Were those successes worth the division, the rancor, the violence? Some say yes. I pray for those people, just as I’ll continue to pray for the man they call their ideological leader.

Today, we welcome a new President, President Joseph Biden. Do I think the age of insanity is over? No. But I have hope that a good man and a handful of good men and women in Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, can lay the groundwork for unity. I hope those who continue pushing violence as the means to a political end are marginalized, silenced, and castigated. Get them out of government so, as Carl Sandburg wrote, the people who have been “tricked and sold and again sold,” can “go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.”

There will still be raucous debate in these here United States in the days to come. There always has been. Still, we belong to each other. I hope we learn to remember that. And I hope we find our rootholds.