A new one to remember, before the new ones ahead . . .
by Mauve Maude
January 7, 2021
In a long-term memory that’s both extensive and detailed, I have just a palmful of “JFK moments”–the ones in which you remember exactly what you were doing and how everything felt at an historic moment, so well you can instantly, mentally put yourself right back in it.
The first is the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle thirty-five years ago this month. And I wasn’t even watching it like many elementary school students my age. What I remember is the frozen moment in my first grade classroom, Ms. Fitzgerald’s, when it was announced: over the PA, right after it happened, by the principal, Mr. Hale, and then, Brian Davis’s face. He was a kid I don’t think even attended our school the next year, but I still remember exactly what he looked like, in shock at the age of six or seven: blond-haired, blue eyes wide, and mouth hanging open. He’d gotten up to sharpen his pencil, and was standing there when it was announced. We were young, but we knew what it meant. And that moment stuck. Now I wonder how he remembers it.
The second I share with everybody old enough to remember. I was in college, and I was almost to work at Barnes and Noble, listening to the radio in my car, when I heard a news report about a plane hitting one of the towers of the World Trade Center. It had just happened, and there were no other details, and I thought it must have been a freak accident with an amateur pilot in a small aircraft, which sounded awful enough. But when we were getting ready to start our pre-opening meeting, somebody told us about the second one. And most of that entire day, I suspect will be permanently burned in until my brain begins to degenerate, maybe not even then.
I’m fairly certain yesterday, January 6, 2021, will stay with these two.
Three days after the new Congress was sworn in, and the morning after the Georgia runoff election, I woke up to the news that Raphael Warnock had defeated Kelly Loeffler, and that Jon Ossoff was leading David Perdue in a race “too close to call”. After I drove to my child’s school and back twice (because my youngest left her glasses in the car), I ran in from pouring rain and put on the news in the background while I tried to concentrate on other things–work I needed to do . . . the Terminix guy came and checked out the yard . . .
Of course, I was aware of the protests planned since November, if not before. Even my little county contingent of so-called patriots had sent a delegation, posting pictures from their flight on social media the day before, after months of truck parades and other proudly unmasked events. I was aware that the President would address them, as he typically does when his rallies are right there in the neighborhood. And I predicted things would get a little crazy, in the streets. But I was tuned in for the Congressional count more than anything.
The first attempt only went as far as Alabama. It wasn’t long before “protesters” were clashing with the police they used to support, pushing their way into a federal building the President once claimed as sacred, to the applause of his fans. Before I knew it, alone, I was furiously updating Facebook and expressing my shocked outrage directly to the TV while the dog wondered what was wrong with me.
The definition of sedition doesn’t get much clearer.
By mid-afternoon I’d be tearing myself away to barely make a doctor visit, trying to go about a normal day while the U.S. Capitol was being raided by insurrectionists, one who had already been shot, and a pair of whom oh-so-symbolically took down an American flag and replaced it with a flag for a man. In the doctor’s office, while I had my temperature taken, and talked to the lady at the billing desk about new year insurance, and sat in the waiting room, other masked patients stayed glued to their phones, while the staff and one friendly country fella chatted about the weather and other safe subjects. When I was finished I hurried off to pick up my kids. It was still raining non-stop.
My mom called to tell me she was leaving work early and to be careful getting home, worried about people acting up. Sure enough, a guy in a big truck hazed her on her way home, and she removed her Biden bumper sticker by the end of the night. Of course, also by the end of the night, Joe Biden was officially certified to be President-elect of the United States, exactly two months after his victory was first declared.
Today, the world is reacting. In two apparently different ones, there’s talk of resignations, invoking the 25th Amendment, and another impeachment, and also, claims that the President’s supporters weren’t responsible for yesterday’s American carnage at all (fake news), that it was really leftist agitators in (really good) disguise, and that the peaceful crowds we always see at the President’s rallies were simply holding a peaceful protest. Where they were, I don’t know. But since all of the abnormality of January 6, 2021, stemmed from an allegation story nobody has been able to show, or honestly really needed, any evidence for, I don’t think surprise is something we should expect to feel there.
I don’t ever claim to live in a black and white world. I see shades of gray in almost everything, and that’s exactly why I’m here. But, I am also a proponent of the meanings in language and the usefulness of rules (sometimes referred to as law and order), and some things are so clearly defined, even I can’t see much if any wiggle room between two positions. The definition of sedition doesn’t get much clearer than a President of a democratic republic, who’s pushed false narratives about his omniscient authority for months, inciting violence against the lawful government from people he knows to be impressionable, desperate, angry, and straight-up threatening, in the very heart of our democracy. That’s what I watched yesterday. Today, I’m anxious to see this President ushered out. On the issue of sedition, if you have any respect for your country there are really only two positions to take: seditious, or not.
And only one of those brings Americans together. The other threatens to tear us all apart. I hope that anybody who supports what happened in Washington yesterday, can some day see that. I know they don’t care for the truths the rest of the world can see, but they are there just the same, and they always will be.
In the meantime, for me, whether it’s a temporary Mike Pence or the elected Joe Biden, the 46th Presidency can’t come fast enough.