Today, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as president and vice president of the United States in a battened-down Washington, D.C. The streets are blockaded and filled with National Guard soldiers after armed insurrectionists, egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol two weeks ago.
Here in Portland’s Old Town, we are streaming the inauguration from a window that looks out onto streets where many people in poverty live their lives in public view.
We’re handing out coffee and marking the morning as an event that we all can share. This is because everyone at Street Roots — from our journalists to our vendors — is deeply invested in the current events shaping our country and our city. But it is also because isolation compounds stress in these turbulent times.
Yet it’s hard to be a safe haven in a pandemic. Lately, many of us have been remembering how, only a year and a half ago, when Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer marauders threatened the city with violence, we opened up the doors in our Old Town office so more unhoused people could take refuge. We shared potluck food while Joey Gibson waved an American flag kitty-corner from our door, one wall between us and the jostling crowds and police sirens.
That’s just not possible now.
As much as we need each other, we also know that shared breath can kill us, so we’re setting up canopies in the street and broadcasting the inauguration from our window, offering some meager hospitality when the threat of violence pervades the peace of many — particularly people of color.
We sit from a vantage point in Oregon where we’ve seen our state Capitol stormed, as well as our national Capitol. On Dec. 21, right-wing protesters smashed the glass on the doors of the state Capitol and slipped in through a side door opened by Rep. Mike Nearman (R-Independence).
The Oregon Legislature was scheduled to begin its long session yesterday, but it delayed convening, bracing for Inauguration Day violence as are many other capitols around the United States — just two weeks to the day from when insurrectionists waved a Confederate flag in the nation’s Capitol, underscoring the threat of white supremacist hate. Most of these insurrectionists, as well as some Republican legislators, were unmasked, initiating what was likely another superspreader event, sickening at least three members of Congress, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Brad Schneider (D-Illinois).
Again and again, Trump-supporting rallies and uprisings leave sickness and death in their wake.
The virus has spiked at just a time when there’s the hope of the vaccine, but people keep dying for want of it.
But this is clear: Biden’s focus on increasing vaccine production and distribution will save thousands of lives. Legislation that gets the vaccine out cannot come soon enough.
As of press time, more than 3,000 people were dying most days from COVID-19 in the United States, and our country was approaching nearly 400,000 deaths due to the virus and resulting complications. Since March, when the World Health Organization declared the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, every day has felt like life and death at Street Roots — as it does all across the globe.
And it’s a swelling, anxious time because, while there is the capability of vaccinating people, there are not enough vaccines and deaths are spiking.
It is because that possibility is out there, but it can’t be actualized, that each day holds additional threat for people in poverty who don’t have the jobs that could qualify them for the vaccine. Our first hope of the government offering vaccines to unhoused people looks like it will be for those who are over 65.
But at the very time of this heightened threat, there’s also the possibility of actual legislation that could make material difference. Additional stimulus money, state and local aid, increased minimum wage, increased vaccines — all of this matters for the poorest people on the streets. We need this, and more.
The Biden-Harris administration is proposing immediate legislation that includes $400 billion to fight coronavirus for vaccines, testing and support for schools; more than $1 trillion relief to individuals through $1,400 in stimulus checks; and $350 billion funding to state, local and tribal governments.
Yes.
Congress will need to manage an impeachment trial that values accountability and a reckoning while also moving out federal resources to deal with a global pandemic and poverty that are both fixed to racial injustice. There’s the opportunity to demand that government resources reach those who need them most — and we need to hold Trump and others accountable. It all needs to happen at once.
It’s a heartbreaking time. So many people are tired, afraid, enraged. But, it’s also go-time. Time to come together, look forward toward solutions and re-energize. We begin this process today, over coffee, as we watch the inauguration of our 46th president.