I watched most of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ inauguration Wednesday, and I was struck by one thing. It wasn’t anything specific that happened on the stage (though there were several highlights), it was something inside myself.

The best way to describe it is feeling like a fever had broken: that moment when you’re lying in your bed, exhausted from fighting a really bad case of the flu, but the chills are gone, the headache had subsided, and you’re no longer shivering. When you feel weak from the fight, but no longer weak from the disease.

Sometimes you don’t know how good you have it until you lose it all, but the reverse is true, too. If you’re fighting a disease, you forget what “normal” feels like. Then, when you’re finally on the other side of it, you remember, “Oh, yeah. Life really can be like this, can’t it?”

False hopes

Battling an illness can be a roller-coaster ride: You wake up feeling a little better and think you’re on the mend, only to feel worse again the next day.

One reason the past four years were so exhausting is that we kept trying to convince ourselves it couldn’t possibly be this bad. We kept hoping Trump would get a clue; that he would behave like a decent human being. And he’d tease us by giving us false hope every time he read a teleprompter speech someone else had written. But then he’d always revert to form, and his behavior was even worse than before.

Or he’d tweet something. Then something worse. Then something even worse. And we started thinking the situation was so dire we, the patient, might never recover.

By the time Joe Biden won the election, our entire anatomy was riddled with disease. It had pervaded every corner of our being, and it traveled through our bloodstream to the heart of our democracy, launching an invasion of the Capitol. The level of toxicity had gotten so high we needed to call up all the antibodies our body politic had produced over the course of our 200-year history just to survive. And we did. Barely.

Finally...

Then the fever broke.

We got the first inkling of it when Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Everyone knew the continual bombardment of toxic tweets was exhausting, but it was hard to see how damaging they were in real time. But when they stopped, it felt like a breath of fresh air. And the statistics reflect that: In the week after Trump got the boot, mentions of election fraud plummeted from 2.5 million to 688,000.

Inauguration Day felt even better. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to see our government run by professionals, not a collection of clueless cronies who didn’t know or care what they were doing. It was easy to forget about their stunning level of incompetence (no health care plan, no plan to distribute the COVID vaccine) until we were presented with a contrast.

And what a contrast it is. Biden’s empathy replacing Trump’s malignant narcissism. Trump sneaking out of the White House and saying a pathetic goodbye to a couple of hundred supporters — not including his own vice president — followed by an inauguration ceremony full majesty and driven by two things we’d been missing past four years: motivation and inspiration.

Speaking of inspiration, I don’t think I’ve ever been as inspired as I was by poet Amanda Gorman’s uplifting poem, which should go down in history alongside the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as among the most consequential in our history. It perfectly encapsulated the feeling of the moment:

When day comes, we step outside of the shade,

Aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light

If only we’re brave enough to see it

If only we’re brave enough to be it

But...

Gorman’s poem was just what the doctor ordered. So was Biden’s inaugural address, the bipartisan show of unity, and the feeling of a return to health that permeated the entire day.

But the patient will need some time to recover. Like those who have survived COVID, with its lingering effects, we probably won’t feel fully healthy for a while yet, and we can’t be lulled into a false sense of security that we’ve been cured.

Many of the conditions that caused this disease remain in place: bigotry, willful ignorance, incompetence, corruption, and a system that came a lot closer to breaking than we ever thought possible. If Trump’s cronies had controlled Congress, they could have thrown out the election results. If the insurrectionists had turned down a different corridor a few seconds earlier, there might have been a mass slaughter in the Capitol.

Normalcy can’t mean complacency. We have to focus on wellness, bolster our immune system, and take our preventive medicine.  

Just because we survived the disease this time, doesn’t mean we will the next time there’s an outbreak — and there will be a next time. You can count on it.

That said, I’m grateful the fever has broken. I’d forgotten what it was like to live in a healthier America, and I know I’m going to enjoy it.

Stephen H. Provost is a former journalist and author of three books about the Trump presidency, available on Amazon at www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RC7L8X1.