January 6

January 6

Four years ago at this hour, supporters of Donald Trump, convinced by him that Joe Biden stole the election he lost, were storming the Capitol.

people standing and holding flags during daytime — Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

I can still see the images of people carrying American flags and wearing MAGA hats, running over the grounds of the Capitol, breaking through barriers and storming the steps, using all kinds of tools to break windows and force doors open, cheering and shouting like they were at a wrestling match.

I was sickened then, and I am sickened now, just thinking about it.

I’m also angry.

Nobody likes to lose. Every single person who runs for any office and loses feels it. I have heard candidates talk in retrospect about how they descended into a deep depression after a loss. I’m sure Donald Trump was depressed, but what he did with his anger and his depression is unconscionable.

He encouraged people to travel to Washington and to be ready to march to the White House. It was well-planned, and he was successful in getting people from all over the nation to do his bidding. He called them patriots. I called them thugs and traitors, and my categorization has not changed and will not.

They stormed the Capitol, beating police officers and breaking into the offices of lawmakers. They spread feces on the walls, and put their feet on the desks of lawmakers they didn’t like – and threatened to hang Vice President Pence. (https://dean.house.gov/2022/1/jan-6-capitol-insurrection-a-year-later-congress-members-reveal-details-of-their-escape)

One woman, Ashli Babbit, was shot by law enforcement as she was breaking a window (https://www.nbcnews.com/video/capitol-shooting-that-led-to-ashli-babbitt-s-death-captured-on-video-99180613572) and she is now hailed as a patriot and a hero by MAGA. She is neither.

The defeated president was in on it, and he sat for hours, watching the destruction on television before finally calling it off. He was hopeful that the violence would turn the tide on the election results, and he sat in front of a television, watching. He knew what the violence was about, and he waited with bated breath, hoping for his desired result for the outcome. “Will be wild,” he said in a tweet. (https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111341161/how-trumps-will-be-wild-tweet-drew-rioters-to-the-capitol-on-jan-6)

He said then and he says now that it was a “day of love.” Hardly. It was a day that will “go down in infamy,” as destructive in its purpose as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I remember trembling with anger when I read that the administrator of the General Services Administration refused to sign a letter that authorized President Biden to have access to funds he would need to govern. Her name was Emily Murphy, and she refused to do her job. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-gsa-letter-biden-transition/2020/11/08/07093acc-21e9-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html)

There is so much that happened on January 6 and for the four years after Trump’s defeat that it is hard to remember it all and process it. But today, Vice President Kamala Harris is presiding over the election of Donald Trump, as Vice President Pence attempted to do four years ago, and the result is that a convicted felon will be president and will be working to put people in prison merely for being his political opponent.

It is sickening.

And equally sickening is the gathering of weak, wealthy white men, ready to ruin the lives of millions of Americans as they throw around their money and privilege. They will be working to take America “back” to a time they believed was better, when white men were in control and everyone else had to suck it up and do what they were told.

This is a bad day for America. I hope there are enough Americans who love having freedom and will fight with every bit of their energy. America is the laughingstock of the world, That, Mr. Trump, is the reality we are in right now. That is what you’ve done. God help us all.

A candid observation.

White Supremacy: America’s Incurable Virus

I learned early that having a virus was much more deadly than having a bacterial infection. The latter could be treated with antibiotics. On the other hand, There was no miracle drug for viral diseases. Viruses had to “work their way” out of our bodies.

I remember reading stories in Readers Digest about the predicaments of young children, many of them babies, falling ill and succumbing to viruses and I learned to fear them. Being sick was one thing; being sick but having no medicinal cure or treatment was quite another.

When my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I remember watching in horror as she suffered. Her cancer was treated with radiation and chemotherapy, and yet she remained sick and got worse. In the end, the disease won. Cancer consumed and killed her – and I remember thinking that cancer must be a virus because medicines could not kill it. At that time, it seemed that there was nothing effective enough to kill the seed or abnormality that caused it, and it refused to “work its way out” of affected bodies. To me, it was like a cold, only far worse. The difference is that the virus that causes head and chest colds can be forced out by consuming liquids and resting.

But there is no liquid, no tonic, that this country can consume that will push this hatred and bigotry out of the American political and sociological ecosystem Our country has a sociocultural belief system that behaves like a virus, carved out of the need to find justification for the treatment of Black people in this country. While that belief system was always in place, it seems to have gotten worse for white evangelicals twice: once after the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and once again after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education that determined that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Necessary for white people in this country to feel comfortable was for non-white people and women to “know their place.” White people determined themselves to be dominant. Black people, Native Americans, and women fell into lower categories. As long as these people did not rise against white authority or challenge white men in power, things were said to be going well.

But when, after slavery and during Reconstruction Black men were given the right to vote and did so, tipping the scales of power toward a more equitable society, those who had been in power began to wretch with fear and anger, and they rebelled. They intensified efforts to keep Black people under their control, creating Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, designed to put and keep things “back” to where they were “supposed” to be. That included taking away their right to vote.

I have not researched how prevalent was the fear of miscegenation when Black people were enslaved and white men raped Black women at will and were never held accountable. But what did happen was the “race mixing” they feared would happen between Black and white children as they railed against the 1954 US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Though the race mixing had already been put in motion by the actions of white men free to rape whomever they wanted, now, with Black and white children attending the same school, the issue of “race mixing” gained a seat in the front row of the American drama of race relations. The government was going against the will of God, who, some said, was the “original segregationist,” using selected scriptures from the Hebrew Bible including the story of Ham and the story of the Tower of Babel, among others. The government was breaking divine law in pushing for racial equality and an end to segregation anywhere, but especially in public schools. So enraged with the ruling were the people of the South that they intensified their fight against racial equality using their conception of God and their interpretation of the Bible as proof. In 1954, Rev. Carey Daniel of Dallas, TX preached a sermon entitled, “God, the Original Segregationist.”(https://crdl.usg.edu/record/usm_hmp_mus-m393-0031) Daniel and others posited that God intended for all races to live separately, which was why the Bible said that God created separate continents and scattered the people who were in the Tower of Babel. Had God intended the races to live together, God would have created the world’s geography in such a way that supported full equality of all. The government, they said, was encouraging people to go against God’s will.

What they did not mention in their diatribes was that it was they who had apparently gone against the will of God, as they were the ones who explored and “discovered” lands that non-white people already inhabited, took residents of those lands out of their country, and brought them to the Americas. The miscegenation they so feared had been begun by them.

This virus of white supremacy has so badly infected this country that it has spread, like the virus that caused COVID-19, around the world. The United States has created its own strain of white supremacy that it has taught to everyone in the world who, in turn, recognizes and uses it as a point of attack, and pounces on at every opportunity to weaken the country that has boasted that it is better than others.

Our enemies are quite familiar with our peculiar virus and have no qualms about attacking us at times when the virus rises up.

We are an infected country. The question is, “How do we address it? How do we get rid of the virus that is still swirling around in our national digestive system? We cannot pass laws that will get rid of it, nor is there a quick sociological fix. The virus has settled into the American DNA and is multiplying.

Will the virus work its way out of our national constitutional framework? Or will it finally dehydrate us as a nation and cause us to become so weak that we will be ripe for the enemies that want to overtake us?

A candid observation …

Who Will Pick the Strawberries?

Mass Deportation Will Affect the American Economy – or Will It?

During the General Election campaign of 2024, a person who appeared to be an immigrant asked the now president-elect who would do the work in the fields if he were elected, given his plan to implement mass deportations.

The president-elect did not answer the question directly, but it is clear that if or when the deportations take place, the American economy will take a big hit. According to Mike Madrid, a Latino GOP political consultant and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the planned deportations would have a devastating effect on the American economy.

The American Immigration Council estimates that the cost to the economy could be over $315 billion, and that figure is thought to be very conservative. (https://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article294848924.html)

person in gray hoodie holding green and brown carton — Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

But it is hard to believe that the creators of Project 2025 have not already figured in the toll on the economy if immigrants are seized and either deported or thrown into detention camps.

Those who have salivated for this crackdown on the presence of immigrants in this country have certainly looked back and studied how after slavery was outlawed. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the powers that be found a new way to use African and African American bodies to continue to do the work that created this economy, not as enslaved persons, but as criminals, whose sentence was to work in agriculture, companies, and corporations and not get paid.

Slavery was prohibited except in instances where Black people had committed a crime, according to the 13^th Amendment. The work, then, was to get people arrested – making them criminals – and then enslaving them legally. People of African descent were arrested and jailed for things like vagrancy, breaking curfew, walking on the wrong side of the street, and not having a job.

There is no reason to believe that the Project 2025 authors and supporters of the policy it has proposed have not already figured out how to use immigrant labor while simultaneously keeping them detained, denying them rights even if they are American citizens, and doing it all by taking away their independence and keeping them dependent on the government for food, water, and shelter, which in effect would become their “pay.”

Just as Black people were re-enslaved following the Emancipation Proclamation, immigrant labor will be used to continue to use immigrant labor, using new techniques, thereby quieting the segment of the population that wants those who are here to be deported, but who would welcome their labor under government control.

In 2023, 18 percent of the economy was built by the labor of an estimated 31 million immigrants. There is no way this country is going to stop using their labor; they will, or perhaps have already figured out how to continue to use their labor. (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-does-immigration-affect-us-economy#:~:text=A%20total%20of%20thirty%2Done,percent%20of%20the%20civilian%20workforce.)

Some, perhaps most Americans are not aware of Convict Leasing (which is what was being practiced after the Emancipation Proclamation), a system that resulted in freed Blacks working for a corporation or business for the rest of their lives with no pay or benefits, and dying before their “sentences” were completed. That’s because the justice system found ways to raise their fines and therefore extend their sentences for doing the work that nobody else wanted to do, and not get paid. Many died while in the jaws of a racist but greedy government that needed free Black labor to grow the American economy. Some former slave owners were paid up to $300 for every Black person they freed. The re-enslavement of black people was a money-making operation for everyone except Black people.

It was called, according to the book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, and it lasted for eight decades.

Immigrants do much of the work that makes life comfortable for Americans, including picking strawberries and lettuce and other fruits and vegetables we never doubt we will see in grocery stores. They paint houses and repair roofs for companies and receive a pittance of what those jobs are worth. They do much and have done much to build this economy, and there is no way the companies, families, and businesses that use them are going to let them go.

Those who are not deported but are relegated to detention camps will be the new captives, perhaps not giving as much a boost to the Prison Industrial Complex as did the criminalization of Blacks, but certainly contributing to a new system of oppression that will allow the development of a new economic project that will keep this economy alive at the expense of hard-working people, who have never been appreciated.

Some think that talking about the effects of mass deportation is hyperbole, and do not believe that America would resort to such callous treatment of human beings, but they reveal a lack of knowledge of American history. This political system built camps and detained over 100,000 Japanese following World War II. Jesuits were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church and this country to build boarding schools for Native American children, separating them from their families because, they said, they wanted to “civilize” the children – i.e., make them more like their oppressors. They were treated horribly at these schools as they were prohibited from learning about their culture and being beaten for many things, including speaking in their native tongue.

Right now, the American government is considering the purchase of 4100 acres in Texas to build a detention center for immigrants.( https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/19/texas-border-starr-county-ranch-trump-deportation/)

Who will pick the strawberries? We need not worry. This government has a track record of figuring out how to get what it wants from the labor of people it does not consider or want to be considered to be Americans.

It is part of the American political tradition, a step back to “make America great again.”

What Hurts Most

Though I am disappointed with the outcome of the election, what is bothering me most is that such a large swath of people voted for a man who is a convicted felon, guilty of sexually abusing a woman, and said to have stoked the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

That he is respected despite all of this is beyond me.

He calls himself a patriot, again despite his support of the desecration of the Capitol and his intent to overthrow the results of the election. Patriots don’t do that, do they? He says he is for law and order, though he apparently approved of his supporters striking law enforcement officers who were trying to maintain law and order on that fateful day.

He called COVID-19 a hoax, causing too many people to refuse treatment because they believed him. He stole classified documents and apparently hid them in plain sight all over his house. He had private meetings with Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office, not allowing anyone, including the press, to be present. Do patriots do that?

Colin Kaepernick was lambasted for kneeling in protest against police brutality against Black people and was not only blasted for being unpatriotic but was effectively thrown out of the National Football League.

But a convicted felon who stoked an insurrection is worthy of serving a second term as president of the United States?

I don’t understand how people cannot care about what his administration wants to do – and has outlined what they plan on doing in Project 2025 – to change this government and this country. The very things that made America the most respected democracy are being thrown out, including some of our basic freedoms. There is awareness of how dangerous it is for women of childbearing age as the government seeks to have total control over our bodies. Although he is not the only one, last week I read where Nicholas Fuentes chanted, “Your body, my choice!” to women who were standing nearby. (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/12/business/video/hateful-rhetoric-women-your-body-my-choice-brown-intv-digvid)

How can anybody be all right with that? And how come the incoming president won’t decry it and say it isn’t an acceptable thing to day?

Empires fail. I get that. And it feels like the American Empire has been on life support for a long time. One of the dangers of being this sick is that the masses do not know what’s ahead. The people leading the movement to take the government away from the “Libs” know that people do not read or listen or analyze and compare what people in public say. They know that far too many people rely on social media and any message – true or not – that they hear they take as the truth.

That alone is troubling, but when we add that people know what this man has done and is pledging to do once he is in office but are not bothered, I shudder. We, this country, are following a path that other failing democracies took; when they realized that their beloved leader did not have their best interests at heart and in fact killed many of those who supported him, it was too late. https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/people-never-thought-hitler-would-go-that-far-until-he-did-496b2db613dd)

We are in for a difficult stretch. I don’t know if he will pardon the criminals (he calls them patriots) who violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. I have read that he wants to put the Biden family in jail, along with Christopher Wray and others (https://www.newsweek.com/trump-picked-fbi-director-will-prosecuted-imprisoned-steve-bannon-1702432) I don’t know what the incoming president has on Wray, but what I do know is that the president-elect has been convicted of serious crimes and will likely never have to pay for it.

Half the country is all right with that, and that hurts.

The America that we have known is about to become a memory.

A candid observation…

Looking Forward to the End of eight years of political turmoil

We are eight days from the General Election, and my biggest hope is that it go off without a glitch.

But I am worried because the former president does not admit to losing anything, and if he loses this election, as he did in 2020, I am sure he is going to use his power, his money and the money of his wealthy friends, and his lies to stoke his supporters into another frenzy resulting in violence and causing confusion and doubt as to the legitimacy of the election. There will be a few more days, weeks, or moths of emotional manipulation of the American people.

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I am angry and tired. I am confused about why the election is so close, given all of the issues of the former president, including being a convicted felon and a convicted sexual offender. I am angry at America’s system of government and, frankly, stupid and worthless rules, that allow a convicted felon to run for the highest office in the land. I am angry at Merrick Garland for what feels like his lackluster responses and reactions to the crimes of the former president, allowing way too much time to pass before the former president was finally called out for his behavior and his disrespect of this country, its institutions and its laws.

I am angry that indecency and vulgarity have been accepted as normal by the media; I am angry at so-called regulatory systems that have allowed Fox News and others to continue to operate though their “talent” spews lies and in doing so, has supported the dismantling of this country. I am bothered that people giggle rather than call the former president out on his lies, name-calling, and abusive language – be it on an outdoor platform or standing in a church. (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/9/2245657/-Trump-encourages-TPUSA-crowd-to-start-curse-word-chant-in-a-church)

I am outraged that the media, for the most part, has either not been aware of or has chosen to ignore the ominous path on which the former president is taking the country. Do they not care that this country might become a Fascist nation?

I am still going through my emotions and disappointments. There is so much to sort through.

But one thing (in addition to what I have just written) I am fairly sure about is that because of the antics, the lying, and the emotional manipulation of the emotions of American citizens for eight long years, many people in this country may be suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and more. It feels like there are many people who at this time may need medication or therapy because this entire Trump experience has so battered their feelings and emotions.

I find it troubling that so many Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives have been silent in public, allowing the former president to do and say whatever he has wanted. Some Republicans are speaking out now, but for eight years, they have been largely silent. There has been no harbinger of truth to bring this runaway train of bigotry, hatred, deception, and greed to a halt, as did the words of US Attorney Joseph Welch, who stopped Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954 as the senator continued his contrived attack on communism, ruining the lives of countless innocent people, as he attacked yet another person during a hearing: “Sir, at long last, have you no decency?” (https://www.scdemocratonline.com/stories/put-an-end-to-this,25068)

Where have been the lovers of democracy? Why have so many people remained silent, compliant, and complicit as the former president and his friends have systematically and intentionally worked to undo the American republic? I have little respect for those who released books after they got out of office or the employ of the Federal government about the depravity of what they experienced during the Trump presidency.

Why didn’t they say something out loud early in this circus, not because they wanted to sell a book but because they wanted to save their country?

I have not written much in the past months because I have been watching, and, unfortunately, inhaling the toxicity that has been hovering over us all. The toxicity has been caused not only by the masters of the soft coup that has continued since January 6, but also apparently inspiring millions of people to support the former president.

They are afraid of “the bad people” that their hero talks about all of the time, especially “the immigrants.” The former president’s language has always fed the fear of so many white Americans, language that has also been used by those who lead their churches. The goal of the former president and his minions has not been to save America; it has been, rather to empty the current “swamp” and fill the hole with their own ideology. Americans, mostly but not all white, have fully accepted and internalized the message that “the bad people” must be herded up and sent away for America to be “great” again.

Writing this is helping me push through my feelings which have constipated my spirit, but this unpacking is just the beginning. As I write, I feel the density of my anger and disappointment, coupled with a sense of dread about the former president and his friends will do in the aftermath of the upcoming election.

They want to end democracy and have said so.(https://newrepublic.com/post/179247/jack-posobiec-democracy-cpac-2024) Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025, said they want to end multiculturalism. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQjdwsZhE_Q)

We are in trouble. I hope we get through this, but I hope even more that we have learned that people must work to preserve and improve what or who they say they love because there are always wolves in waiting who want to tear down those very things.

A candid observation …