Op-ed: This is what healing in Joe Biden's America starts with

President Joe Biden wants to heal America.

“My whole soul is in it,” he told a socially distanced crowd of former presidents, Supreme Court justices and members of Congress in his inaugural address Wednesday. “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation.”

These words, and his explicit calls for healing the divides between “red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal,” were powerfully relevant and spoken to every American. 

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If you’ve ever shared a meme about “Nasty Nancy” or called Republicans fascists or racists for supporting former President Donald Trump, or participated in a political shouting match with your uncle at Thanksgiving, Biden was speaking to you.  

If you solely blame Trump for the events that transpired on Jan. 6 or you dismiss accountability for the rioters by claiming Antifa “infiltrated” the protests and caused the chaos, Biden was speaking to you.

(At this point, my Jeff Foxworthy impression is becoming more high-pitched and my cadence nearing a crescendo.)

If for decades you avoided the simple act of voting, thinking our institutions are on autopilot and democracy would survive without your civic engagement, Biden was speaking to you.

But while framing the divides politically is close to the mark of what I hoped he would say, he missed the bullseye by inches. Our chronic condition, our nation’s illness, is worse than that.

“Everybody’s attitude reminds me of drivers’ attitudes on the highway,” 28-year-old Toader Mateoc told researchers conducting a global survey about COVID-19 for the Financial Times. “Everybody faster than me is crazy, while everybody slower than me is an imbecile.”

Our challenge is not that we are so passionate about our ideology, our party or our candidate that we hate the other side; our challenge is that we are obsessed with ourselves and our perpetual rightness. We have conditioned ourselves to believe we should get whatever we want whenever we want it. So when things go awry, and we don’t get it all handed to us on a silver platter, things get messy.  

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And it’s this hurdle that Joe Biden alone cannot overcome. He cannot heal a country unwilling to admit it needs healing, unwilling to acknowledge that there is more to this business of life than our petty wants.  

That we could be so cavalier, so careless, so heartless about the well-being of others that we put politics before community is not an indictment of Trumpism. It’s an indictment of a broken society in which the immediate wants of the individual come before the needs of family, community and said society itself.  

As former White House chief of staff Andy Card would remind those of us on George W. Bush’s staff, “If you need to see the president, you can see the president. If you want to see the president, you can’t.”

America today operates in the reverse. Front-and-center are our wants, with little regard given to our needs. For those who wanted Trump to be declared the winner despite the evidence, the needs of our precious democracy and fragile institutions to function properly was secondary. Similarly, for Democrats who wanted to tear Trump down with the hoax of Russian collusion, the needs of, you know, proof were unnecessary.

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The America Biden finds himself leading is in a frightening moment of disarray not so much because of political dysfunction, but because we’ve given up on caring about anyone but ourselves. We must take stock of our share of the blame and admit we all have work to do.

Can Democrats and Republicans both willingly lay down their rhetorical arms? Can Americans break our addiction to outrage? To doom-scrolling? To ourselves?

Just as Biden promises to be the president of “all Americans,” it is all Americans who must admit their failings and pledge to heal their divides – political, personal and communal. If we cannot admit we have a problem, and think only the other side should be held accountable, there is no chance that Biden – or this country – prevails in the urgent task before us.

Pete Seat, a monthly IndyStar opinion contributor, is a former White House spokesman for President George W. Bush and campaign spokesman for former Director of National Intelligence and U.S. Senator Dan Coats. Currently he is a vice president with Bose Public Affairs Group in Indianapolis. He is also a Council on Foreign Relations Term Member and author of "The War on Millennials."