The annual return of spring with its warmth and replenishing urges is most welcome. But what is even more greatly appreciated at this crucial moment in the history of our democracy is the companionate evolution of the restoration of our nation’s sanity.

We are emerging from a what has seemed to be an interminable period of frenzied and mesmerizing imprisonment in a mortal fever of self-destructiveness and decomposition.

In the course of this grievous affliction we inflicted on our body politic repeated wounds and stabbings on those core sensibilities of our national ethos of decency, respect for our fellow citizens, and the critical requirement to conduct our public dialogue in postures of mutual consideration and compassion.

We engaged in screeds of hate and insult, in perorations of abuse and condemnation, and vented our grievances and resentments in furious attacks on those who embraced other faiths and represented other racial identities.

Beyond the environment of social media where this malevolence was ceaselessly renewed with the dawn of each day, so too in reprehensible acts of physical violence and personal depredation on the streets and neighborhoods where we reside did this scenario occur.

However, in the wee hours of January 7th, in a solemn and resolute process of the rejection of chaos, domestic terrorism, and anarchy, did our Congress respond to its official obligations and proceed with the ratification of the results of our most recent electoral contest, and by so doing declared to our populace and those throughout the globe that the world’s most ancient and revered democratic polity though gravely damaged and momentarily incapacitated, had survived and remained viable .

It is from this moment forward that we have witnessed in the succeeding weeks and months the most devoutly to be wished recession of the pathology in which we have been imprisoned.

The diminution of the toxicity and the suicidal protocols in which our republic was mired is attributable to many factors, but perhaps most critically are two indispensable variables; the deprivation of the former president’s access to and perpetual deployment of the social media instruments of Twitter and Facebook, which served throughout the tenure of his administration as the mechanisms by which he would sustain the rage and prejudices of his base .

His unrelenting use of these capacities accomplished many objectives, i.e. the delegitimization of our democratic norms and institutions, the debasement and discrediting of the truth as an imperative element in public discourse, and the platforms by which he could convey the extraordinary attributes and talents with which he was endowed.

That we are no longer subjected to these daily installments of mendacity and self-adulation has permitted the atmosphere in which we exist to cleanse and thus diminish the toxic fumes and lethal poisons and pollutants that had cast such a suffocating and noxious pall throughout the nooks and crannies of our national consciousness.

The merciful silence which we are now enjoying by virtue of his almost complete absence from our airwaves (his occasional appearance on Fox news notwithstanding), would not be as significant as it is in some intrinsic regard if it did not coexist with the more important reality of the conduct of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The contrast between these two personalities could not be more dramatically disparate. In this president humility resides at his epicenter. The truth is a sacred requirement in his communications with the American people, and his competency and experience in concert with the extensive skills and talents of his subordinates is apparent in all that he addresses.

With little fanfare and sparse public pronouncements he unceremoniously reduces the magnitude of the challenges that currently beset us regarding the pathogen of Covid -19 and its economic ramifications, and is reinvigorating those initiatives that constitute the critical imperative of reengaging with our allies in the continuous exertions to contain our adversaries and reinvigorate the capacities of democratic polities throughout the globe.

In addition, the efforts to mitigate the massive economic disparities which obtain in our nation, and the systemic racism with we still grapple as well as the necessity to refurbish our infrastructure and mitigate global warming are also at the epicenter of the agenda to which he is irrevocably committed.

Thus it is these two realities beyond all others that are stimulating the first hesitant appearances of a tentative return to a political atmosphere that may hopefully become more fully and vigorously rendered as our citizens enjoy the fruits and achievements of a presidential hegemony that though it reflects a traditional modus operandi, is in its content and scope more ambitious and enlightened that any paradigm that has been proposed since the new deal.

And as we harvest the magnanimous bounty which his term of office will produce, we shall continue to relegate to the wake of our collective memory the legacy of a president who because of his defects of character, psychological infirmities, and a total indifference to the protocols and practices of an ethical mode of commercial activity came within a hair’s breath of orchestrating the death of American democracy.