Nope

I don't know who John M. Crisp is, other than that he's a syndicated columnist with the Tribune News Service. I've never noticed his byline before. But I did read an op-ed of his that ran in the Star Tribune this morning, and and I still agree with what he said after watching this good day of inauguration activities, including Joe Biden's very positive speech.

The headline the Strib put on Crisp's article was Democracy doesn't need unity, healing, and that fits it pretty well. The part that drew me in was this:

...unity and healing are wonderful aspirations, but they are not essential to democracy.

No, democracy's essential prerequisite is faith. Democracy works only if citizens believe in it.

Most important, they must have faith that their elections are legitimate. And this is Trump's greatest transgression against the nation, convincing millions, with no evidence, that the 2020 election was "rigged."

...our democracy has endured for decades when it was far from unified and healed, and its continuation does not depend on unifying all of its citizens or healing all of their wounds.

In fact, the videos of the insurrection indicate that many of the citizens who attacked the Capitol are beyond unification and healing.

Democracy has been impaired in the past by racism, but not at the level we saw two weeks ago at the U.S. Capitol. Unifying with people who still think what those people were thinking is not possible or advisable.

I would add, it appears that way too many members of Congress are indicating they're beyond unification and healing, too, from the extremes (Greene, Boebert, Cawthorne, Hawley, Cruz) to Kevin McCarthy who made a pretty speech full of unification cloaked in white supremacy. A Wall Street Journal rep today said on Fox News that the Democrats are being divisive by talking about white supremacy. So who's supposed to be doing the unifying?

Biden, of course, struck a more conciliatory tone than I am, which is fine so far. I don't want him to be a president only for the people who voted for him, the way Mafia Mulligan was. But the way to be a president for them is not by upholding white supremacy, even though they think it is. 

We won't be unifying with that.

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Just after I posted this, I saw this from fiction writer Saladin Ahmed on Twitter:

division isn't the problem how can unity be the solution? (the problem is that some people don't want to share the resources and security and social power they stole from other people in the first place)