One year ago today, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, and to commemorate the momentous occasion, youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman delivered a spoken word poem.
Unsurprisingly, the corporate media and celebrities fawned all over the young artist, whose poem, “The Hill We Climb,” addressed racism, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and Biden’s unity pledge.
But as we look back just a year later, it’s more obvious than ever that the unity schtick was a sham and that the hill we’ve been climbing is less like a grassy knoll and more like a disastrous rocky cliff. And we’ve less been climbing up it, and more falling off of it.
To that end, here’s a new tribute — using some of Gorman’s words and ideas to capture Biden’s inaugural year and inject a little reality into the inaugural poem.
‘The Uphill Climb’
When morning breaks on year two, we ask ourselves, where can we find warmth in this never-ending “dark winter”?
The dementia patient we elected. A cross we must bear.
We now see what we have done.
We’ve learned that science can be personified, and that becoming the first female four-star admiral can include a Y chromosome.
Federal power was theirs before we knew it.
Somehow they grew it.
Somehow they lied, we complied, to become a nation that isn’t sick, but is still masked and vaxxed.
We, the residents of a country where a bused black girl can dream of becoming president, only to fail miserably — campaigns are hard — and land in the vice president’s office on Democrats’ race card.
And, yes, she is far from polished, far from pristine, but can power through with a cackle and progressive dream. Root causes are hard to find when it’s your turn to step up.
And though she’s never been to the border, it’s fine, because she’s also never been to Europe.
So the dream team’s committed — to all cultures but ours, colors but white, characters but R’s, and conditions of man (he/him).
And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands before us, but what stands between us.
We widen the divide because we know to put equity first, we must put equality aside.
We lay down our arms because ammunition is impossible to find.
We seek harm to none except parents.
Because they’re domestic terrorists.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say what we know:
That if it isn’t left-wing, it must be Jim Crow.
That even as we worked, we got fired.
Supply shortage, staff shortage, and no one to hire.
That we’ll forever be paying more for gas, inflation.
Although shelves are as empty as our pocketbooks, and even our soul belongs to the CCP, the refrain remains: “C’mon, man! Unity!”
Scripture tells us we’re all made in God’s likeness.
But that’s not important, like combatting whiteness.
This is the uphill climb we never asked for.
Because learning from our past is never enough.
We must rage against history, tear it all down, snuff it out.
And commit to delusion no matter the stretch:
Jan. 6 “insurrection,” “sedition,” Border Patrol whips, and the climate apocalypse.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if they could call it “democracy.”
Big Tech, corrupt media, Democrats’ rigging — in 2020, they succeeded.
But now in the midterms, they will be defeated.
In God (then on family and country) we trust, for while we have our eyes on ’22 and ’24, the FBI has its eyes on us.
This is the era of the ruling class, basking in the self-important swamp of alphabet soup: CNN, CDC, CRT — and “CYA.”
They turn mountains to molehills and molehills to mountains, and to point out this fact is to be censored to no end.
But within this we find the power to take our lives back, in “trusting the science,” we take off our masks.
So rather than do like Jen Psaki, let’s not circle back to the problems of yesteryear and instead recognize: If the president can’t prevail over a complete sentence, how could he prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a people governed by consent, not OSHA; following the example of Florida, not Fauci.
A country where men provide for the women of their house, not seek housing in women’s prisons.
A country where women can run for office and on a girls-only track team.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by federal intimidation because, as some… important person said, “It’s time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day.”
Let us restore our country from the 2021 disastrous trip around the sun.
But after just one year of four, we’ve barely begun.
And so we have learned, we must move where it’s sane.
Blue cities are psycho, so move to red plains.
We must rise from Washington’s District of Vaccine Passports.
We must rise from the poop-littered streets of San Francisco.
We must rise from the bullet-holed Chicago skyline.
Out of the White House correspondence dinner and into the salt mine.
But memory-holing is all the rage, so Biden and friends are turning the page.
Forget blunders and borders and lost education, Afghanistan, Hunter, COVID threats to the nation — it’s all good.
The defund-police commander in chief can backtrack and build back and insist “nothing to see here” — and for the effort, you’ve got to hand it to him.
But it won’t work; we won’t forget the past year.
“Let’s go, Brandon.”
