From the President
January 7 2021: Within crisis, are the seeds of opportunity…
Posted on December 11, 2023 at 12:00 AM
January 6, 2021 dawned on the wings of hope. The Georgia run-off elections the day before looked really promising. Reverend Raphael Warnock was declared a winner and Mr. Jon Ossoff, though a little behind Senator Perdue, was poised to win once the balance of the votes from primarily Blue counties were called. The Democrats were looking at a trifecta and spirits were high. The joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes and confirm Joe Biden’s presidential win was starting at 1pm. The normally routine procedure was expected to be not without its moment of drama with a number of Republicans expected to voice dissent, but the ultimate result was never in question. President-elect Biden would be pronounced the winner. The proceedings in Congress devolved into mayhem and chaos very soon after they began. At the instigation of the sitting President, an unruly mob, incited by Trump to stop the ratification process of Biden’s electoral votes, stormed the Capitol buildings. Breaking down windows & doors, the marauding crowd advanced unchecked causing our elected leaders to hide and take cover. The people’s house was desecrated. Shots were fired. People got hurt. Some died. A shocked nation, and the world, saw this drama unfold on their television screens. Even though order was restored within hours, the space cleared allowing Congress to resume their interrupted business, the reverberations of shock have lasted into the present day. The actions of the first family and their unscrupulous lawyer will live in infamy for evermore. There are videos of the gloating Trump family, behind the scenes, prior to their incendiary addresses to the crowds who had travelled from across the nation. The speeches, full of messages of hate and lies about electoral irregularities, are recorded for posterity. You hear Trump tell the roused mob to run over the Capitol. And then when all hell breaks loose, Trump refuses to release the National Guard. There was obvious criminal intent on the part of the sitting President. Now there are calls for the invocation of the 25th amendment and/or impeachment. We at the WNDC, dismayed as we are by this shocking turn of events, want the focus back on our successes of the previous day. We want to express our joy at the triumph of Democrats in Georgia. This win is seismic in nature because it gives Democrats control of the Senate. With both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands, the Biden/Harris agenda can move forward. The nation is looking for justice. We need to heal from the wounds of the previous four years. Important policy issues like Pandemic Control, Healthcare Equity, Climate change & Environmental Justice, Gun Violence Prevention, Racial Justice, Poverty Alleviation, among others, can now move forward.We worked hard for these runoff races. We scheduled 6 extra Winning Wednesdays after the Presidential election, with 20-45 activists assisting us at each. We wrote 2400 letters with Vote Forward and the Sierra Club. We made hundreds of calls with Reclaim Our Vote and made fundraising appeals for the candidates and helped raise money for the Movement Voter Project Georgia Fund. Our motivated and talented GOTV team deserves kudos as do the thousands of activists across the nation who realized what was at stake. The result is that the first black Senator and the first Jewish Senator have been elected in Georgia. So, even though the next two weeks seem scary if the incumbent in the White House is allowed to remain there, we can see a very bright light at the end of this menacing tunnel. We hope that our elected leaders will finally rise to the occasion and remove the psychologically impaired, malignant narcissist before he strikes one final blow.
Nuchhi Currier
President, Woman’s National Democratic Club