HOW MANY TIMES MUST WE FIGHT THIS WAR?

 By Juan Montoya

The Battle of 2020 has been won by the republic.

After a four-year lull in the national life that Donald Trump gave the rebels time to rebuild their defenses and to provide succor and comfort to the revisionists seeking to turn back the clock and reshape the narrative to chauvinist nationalism suffused with xenophobia, the battle is over.

And it was a close one. It took Pennsylvania - where the corner was turned in the war at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 - to clinch the election for Democrat Joe Biden, a native of the Keystone State.

Pennsylvania was indeed, the key that held the Union together just as a keystone holds the edifice together.

During these four long years the demagogue impostor has used the people's seat of power as a personal throne using that bully pulpit to incite the worst prejudices and base desires of ordinary people and to manipulate and demonize the press and to further marginalize minorities and other groups.

His success at turning brothers against one another, to minimize his ideology's shortcomings, his talent at diverting attention from his numerous sins and failures and to focus the hate of the ignorant at immigrants and others like the LGBTQ community should give us room to pause. Never again.

Even in the throes of a pandemic where - like in Antietam (23,000) and Gettysburg (46, to 51,000) - 100,000s of our fellow citizens, our sisters and our brothers, have perished Trump sings the dismissive siren song of denial that a disease ravishes the land.

His encouragement of right-wing paramilitary fringe groups triggered a similar response from the far-left radical adherents that left a path with a slippery slope on either side for middle-of-the road democracy to tread lightly toward an uncertain future. We have seen armed supremacists standing at the doors of the seat of government intimidating the people's representatives, and good cops gunned down by criminals for performing their duties to serve and protect.

The road to unity will not be easy. The indiscriminate killing of unarmed blacks and browns must stop. Denying institutional racism exists and must be rooted out is a national task that must be undertaken, just as we must put an end to protestors justifying looting and destruction in the name of the victims of racist police. 

In the end, democrats, independents, and moderate republicans rejected the apocalyptic vision of divisiveness and hate - and, by their own hand - filled the Biden-Harris oval and pinned their hopes on the promise of equality and opportunity for all, regardless of the way they look, the individuals they love, or the amount of capital they hold to set a new course based on mutual trust, respect, and the idea that we are all Americans.

That Georgia - the home of Stone Mountain and the Confederacy - should have turned its back on Trump's dog whistle is a sign that the spiritual secession that he had ignited to benefit politically did not take in the heart of the New South.  

This battle is over, but the war has not been won. It will never end, and there will be setbacks and pitfalls along the way. But good people on either side weighed the future promised by both candidates and decided that the road we were on was leading us to endless discord and destructive internecine war and chose another way.

The virus in the other war is still winning. Now that the ideological divisiveness has been abandoned as a national policy, it's time we take a step back, mourn our 230,000 dead, and steer toward a better future. It's time we all reassess the hard views that the last four years have nurtured in our collective national soul and start to believe in one another.

The voices of our veteran dead, who sacrificed their all for us, demand it. All of them, men and women of all creeds, color, and origin, rest together under the good earth, united in eternity.

When this nation unites, nothing can can withstand its strength, be it Nazis, outlaw regimes, or radical fringes of political or religious intolerance anywhere in the world. But first we had to get our own house in order. That is the first step, and we have taken it.

It will be a difficult task to convince the fringes of both sides in our country to trust the middle. But it's a task that must be undertaken. Unless we do it, our message of equality, democracy and freedom to the rest of the world will ring hollow.

The battle is over. It's time to do something even more difficult: to make the peace work.