“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Powerful words, readers, and certainly words to live by. The quote comes from Edmund Burke, an 18th century Anglo-Irish statesmen and author, and I find that it applies today just as much as it did back in the days of the revolutions in America and France.

We find ourselves in a time of deep national divide, with the Republican Party doing little-to-nothing to stop the madness.

They’ve allowed for a horrific cancer to emerge, and we see it spread with each tweet and bizarre press conference held by our supposedly elected Terror-in-Chief.

Of course, this is nothing new. We’ve had to deal with it for three years now, and I’m sure for many of us, that is three years too many. Yet I’ve witnessed something that has given me hope, a feeling I’ve not had for quite some time now. The announcement that Pete Buttigeg, South Bend, Indiana’s mayor, gave on April 14th.

For those of you who didn’t see it, I’d recommend you go to YouTube and watch it immediately, because this wasn’t just a hopeful candidate informing the people of their intentions, this was a speech America needed.

Indeed.

Mayor Buttigeg spoke of the necessity to rebuild, to reconstruct the nation so that it can head into the future rather than slide back into the past, and it’s about damn time we hear this.

Anyone with any knowledge of history can tell you that the America of the 20th century may have been strong, but it was far from great.

It was a land that allowed the Jim Crow Laws to exist, it was a nation that put Japanese-American citizens into internment camps,and for more than 100 years, it has broken one deal after another with the Native Americans.

Not to mention dragging them along the Trail of Tears and inflicting horrible casualties at places like Wounded Knee.

Yet it seems that someone forgot to mention the implication of these actions to Trump, simply allowing him to use them as punchlines whenever he decides to attack people like Elizabeth Warren.

Anyway, let’s get back to the point, the main idea.

Mayor Pete is everything that our current president isn’t.

To put it simply, he’s a statesman, and that’s what our government needs more than ever.

And sure, the Christian Right will go after the fact that he’s a homosexual, but after their endorsement of a man like Donald Trump, we’ve all seen just how little credibility they have.

It’s time for the good to triumph over evil. The Republican Party has proven that they are incapable of doing it, and so it will be up to us. It’s been proven that cancer can be removed, that a body can be saved, and with some luck, we can prove that to be true in this case.

All we have to do is set our sights on the horizon that’s in front of us rather than looking over our shoulder at the things left behind.