The Sound of Silence

That could be a reflection of how complicated this moment really is. More than 400,000 Americans are dead from a pandemic that is still raging. The national vaccine rollout is slow, and new strains of the coronavirus are alarming scientists worldwide. COVID-19 didn’t stop Washingtonians from protesting in the streets this summer, but the country has changed since then. It’s changed a lot in just the past two weeks. Washington, D.C., is in lockdown mode, the result of a far-right delusion that led to a violent insurrection in the seat of American democracy.

Read: A tragic beginning to a presidency.

Seven months ago, I saw demonstrators do the Macarena in Black Lives Matter Plaza, a moment of joy after so many days of marches and die-ins to protest police brutality. I was walking through my neighborhood on November 7 when, at the precise moment that the networks projected Biden the winner, locals exploded out of their homes holding BYE, LOSER! signs and popping bottles of Veuve Clicquot.

To get to the plaza today, supporters had to pass through a TSA checkpoint and walk several blocks out of the way. Once they got there, most stood quietly in a circle, listening to the new president’s inaugural address over someone’s portable loudspeaker. A handful of protesters waved BIDEN-HARRIS or FUCK TRUMP flags. A few of them cheered when Biden promised that “the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.”

Diamond Douglas and her mother, Felicia, arrived in D.C. last night from Greenville, South Carolina. They’d come to town for Obama’s first inauguration, when Diamond was in fourth grade, and they wanted to witness history again, with the swearing-in of the first Black woman vice president. Diamond wished she could be closer to the proceedings—to actually see the ceremony, not listen to it from behind a tall fence more than a mile away. “It’s not what I was expecting,” she told me when I asked how she felt about the attendance and the security. “But I have to respect it, because it’s in the best interest for everyone.”