I love Washington, D.C.  It is the crown jewel of our nation’s government.  The Capitol building, built upon a hill, looks over Washington. Its size and architectural beauty make it a sight to behold every single time you look at it.  Its combination of symbolism and elegant simplicity never get old.  It houses the legislative branch of government where the people’s business is done.  

As I watched the storming of the Capitol last week, this is how I felt:

1. Embarrassed.  We have been the “city upon a shining hill,” an example for democracies all over the world for more than 200 years, and now our political system is so broken that the highest-ranking leader in the land incites a mob to storm the Capitol.  You just can’t make this up, can you?  
2. Pride.  Utah Senator Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator who had the courage to vote for President Trump’s impeachment in February 2020, once again chose country over party when he said this after the storming of the Capitol: “We gather due to a selfish man’s injured pride and the outrage of supporters who he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning. What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy. They will be remembered for their role in this shameful episode in American history. That will be their legacy.”
3. Hope.  The Greeks said many years ago that “through chaos comes change.” People now understand how fragile our democracy really is; people should understand that elections matter; and people should now understand that telling the truth matters and that if you occupy the most powerful office in the world and you lie over 29,508 times, it has consequences. That’s the number of President Trump’s misleading or false claims as of Nov. 5, 2020, as tallied by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column.   
4. Duty.  One of my favorite monuments in Washington is the Korean War Memorial.  Carved in the black granite are the words:  “Freedom is not free.”  Well, after watching the events unfold last Wednesday, it is clear that democracy is not free either.  A democracy, as Lincoln said, is made up of the people, by the people, and for the people.  We all have a duty as citizens to be good stewards of our democracy.  All of us should be judged on whether we are helping to build our democracy or if our actions are helping to tear it down. There is no middle ground.  I hope that Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol is a wake-up call for ALL Americans — Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and anyone else — that we need to do a better job as citizens of this great nation.  I think back to my fifth-grade Civics class where I learned about the responsibilities of being an American citizen.  I offer you my opinion on what the seven responsibilities of every American citizen should be:

1. Obey the law.
2. Pay your taxes.  Former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, “I like to pay taxes.  With them, I buy civilization.”  A note to our political leaders: Please come up with a simple tax system where everyone pays their fair share and we scrap the complex tax code that favors corporations and rich individuals who can afford lobbyists to rig the tax code to their benefit.
3. Know the facts and speak the truth.   Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has said, “We have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have shared public facts.  A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.”  Don’t spend all of your time listening to networks with a clear bias toward any form of political extremism — networks that are trying to profit by dividing our country.   There are a lot of great news outlets that print the truth.  The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, just to name a few.  All of these news organizations offer opinions, but their news reports are based on FACTS.  Contrary to the lies that President Trump has been selling over the past four years, these news organizations deliver REAL NEWS, like the headline in the Los Angeles Times, “Trump-incited mob storms U.S. Capitol.” 
4. Be kind to one another.  No matter what party you identify with, be kind to everyone.  We need to heal this nation and we cannot wait for our national leaders to do it for us.  Hold open a door, say hello with a smile, perform a random act of kindness, ask people if you can help.
5. Respect the opinions of those with whom you disagree.  One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits for Highly Successful People is: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”  
6. Volunteer to help others.  On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he said,  “How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact, not just in theory?”  With the pandemic, social unrest, and one of the most difficult economies in the last 100 years, there are plenty of opportunities for all of us to help those who need it the most.
7. Be knowledgeable about your government and the major issues that we face as a nation.  The more educated our citizens are about the real State of our Union, the better off we will be.  I wrote a book called “Presidential Playbook 2020; 16 Nonpartisan Solutions to Save America.”  The book covers the 16 biggest challenges we face as a nation.  Each chapter starts with a list of the facts and then has a list of simple, commonsense solutions.  You can download it for free here or send me an e-mail at john_burke@trekbikes.com, and I will send you a free hardcover copy (limited quantities).  This book is an eye-opener for both adults and teens.   It is short and chock-full of interesting graphs and facts about our country and our world.   

I have never met Joe Biden.  He seems to me to be a good and decent man who wants to unite America.  As president of the United States, Joe Biden will have a great opportunity to heal the nation’s wounds and to move the country forward.  But in the end, whether or not the nation’s wounds are healed will be up to us: the ordinary citizens.  We cannot control what Biden does as president, but we can control what each one of us does in our everyday lives.  In his letter from the Birmingham, Alabama jail in August of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that the main roadblock to achieving equal rights resulted not only from the actions of the few bad apples, but more importantly, from the silence of good people. 

We are at a critical point in our nation’s history. Now is the time for all good people, no matter what their party, to be worthy of the title: Citizen of the United States.