I was reading through some of my old blogs recently. When I started them, they were reminiscences of other, simpler times, observations on some of the less logical aspects of our existence, and gratitude for the kindnesses and help I’ve received from others.

Some were intended to be humorous. And I think some were. In fact, one lady told me that she laughed until the tears came out of her eyes. I can only believe that she was easily amused.

Then came Trump.

Suddenly most of my blogs were angry; in fact, Linda termed a number of them as rants. I was tired of his divisiveness, his megalomania, his ineptitude, and his willingness to take action without any thought of consequences. He continually proved himself to be ignorant of the requirements of his job and seem to resist any attempts at improvement. He was the first president in my lifetime to be laughed at to his face, even by people who had long been our allies.

Now, it appears that Trump is going away and that Biden, an experienced politician who values knowledge in other people, will be in charge. That gives me hope. Maybe I can get back to writing blogs that recognize the positive things I’ve seen in my eighty-plus years. Here are some things I hope for in a Biden administration.

I hope that my new president can get through most days without doing something that has the adjective “unprecedented” attached to it. Trump has done so many things that our other presidents knew better than to do that we’ve almost quit paying attention. That was dangerous.

I hope that Biden’s administration will take action to help local school districts improve their education output. Right now, we rank somewhere between 14^th and 27^th among developing nations, according to who’s doing the counting and how they calculate their rankings. In 1990, we ranked sixth among developing nations.

I hope that the Biden administration can lead us to a saner healthcare policy. Right now, our healthcare system is rife with greed and inefficiency. We have the most expensive and nowhere near the most effective healthcare among industrialized countries. I don’t really care whether anyone thinks that healthcare is a right or a privilege; the pragmatic attitude is that we need to have accessible healthcare for everyone so that we can avoid the tremendous costs of not having it.

I hope that once again we can regain the trust of our allies and the respect of our enemies. Once, in some things, we were a leader among the nations of the free world. In the other things, we were at least a reliable partner. That’s been true for all of my life, until the Trump administration. We pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Pact, the Climate Accords, and the Clear Skies Treaty. We abandoned our Kurdish allies after they helped us find and kill a terrorist leader, and we ceded our influence on the Pacific Rim and in the Middle East to our enemies.

Under Trump, we became a small, isolated country.

And I hope Biden can respect and act on the expertise of others. One of the most terrifying things about Trump is that he said (and probably believed) that he knew more than professionals in other fields.  He said that he knew more than the Generals and that he consulted with himself on foreign policy. We see where that got us, especially in his response to the COVID pandemic.

Biden, on the other hand, seems to see his advisors as a resource to be listened to. With that attitude, we have a chance to return to some semblance of normalcy after driving down the virus, to quit politicizing such things as masks and holiday greetings, to try to become a united country.

Our country has never been completely united. The split between the North and the South lasted decades after the end of the Civil War. The divide between the haves and have-nots has always created tension. Efforts to close the racial divide have been resisted. Some of us see our government, as Reagan implied, as a problem rather than a solution.

Unfortunately, this last thing—a unified people—is probably a futile hope. At last report, some 70% of Republicans don’t consider Biden’s election legitimate, and short of a miracle, it’s not likely that the Republican-led Senate will be cooperative no matter how beneficial Biden’s programs are.

However, on the bright side, I don’t believe that I’ll wake up every morning and find that the president of the country I’ve been proud of most of my life has done something characterized as “unprecedented.” Or baseless. Or stupid.

I do hope for better days.