This was a tragic day for stability and peace. It was a massive victory for a movement that’s been agitating civil war for years. This is what the boogaloos and QAnons have been salivating over. The symbolism of taking Capitol Hill can’t be understated, and it’s going to fuel the growth of this insurrection tenfold in the coming months.
A lot of my rage today has been directed at the police. Watching them treat these terrorists so gently, seeing white supremacists walk home freely, unharmed, hand-in-hand with the police – it’s beyond infuriating after so many days and nights watching cops brutalize innocent people. But I also feel confusion, because today was the first day I wanted the cops to do their fucking jobs and put a stop to a violent mob threatening the security of our whole country.
My anger turns to fear as I think about the future. No one has the answers. No one knows the way out. The police are just a symptom. So is Trump. Yes, absolutely, impeach and arrest him before he nukes us into the stone age, but he could keel over tomorrow and the course of our country won’t change. That’s not despair or cynicism, it’s a goddamn fact. Too many people believe in false realities – wholeheartedly and without a shred of doubt – and they’re willing to die for these beliefs.
Our way of knowing is broken. We have no methods for reaching consensus. We have no ability to bridge gaps, to reach hearts and minds. Stuck in the time loop of each day’s scroll, it becomes harder to remember more than a few day’s events. A year of quarantine has pushed us ever further into our individual holes, accelerating the radicalization that seems to develop whenever we’re physically isolated but joined together on our digital islands of personal fixation. America is not special in this phenomenon.
Until we find a way to make sense of this insanely complicated world we’ve built around ourselves, it’s going to get worse.