Capitol Occupation: Attempted Coup and Inaugural Rehearsal
When our Capitol building was torched by foreign invaders in 1814, it’s unlikely Dolly Madison alone hoisted Washington’s portrait on her back. Our iconic first president in oils, was probably saved on the backs of slaves, who our 2021 Capitol domestic terrorists believe should have, by example for their descendants, been thankful for a great white father who, driving through struggling Chicago insisted, only black people could live that way.
America now has three days that will live in infamy: 7 December 1941, 11 September 2001 and 6 January 2021. And like Douglas High School (2018), Las Vegas (2017), Pulse Nightclub (2016), and Sandy Hook (2012), convincing ourselves that any day of infamy is the product of a single event, one sensational news cycle, or could be mastered by a desperate individual villain, we delude ourselves.
When we ensconce denial into self-programing falsehoods, we morph our lives into a tragedy in which democratic values are acquitted only for the selected and elected few.
When we raise our right arms in salute, chant whatever and whenever is dictated, hand over our nation’s nuclear codes to court jesters, as a crowning gift to be shared with comrades in the Oval Office — all while half of us worship the ill-prepared recipient with the weight of 74,222,958 votes — indeed, one person does make a difference. And professing, Wir wussten nicht, is neither acceptable nor original.
Must we be dying in an overwhelmed hospital before capable of recognizing the difference between what is and is not, a Hoax?
Must we be attacked at the office, like wildlife helpless against the onslaught of ravenous hunters looking to indiscriminately mount heads of friends and foes alike, before Conservative enablers and hypocrites become superficially contrite?
Must reminders of our systemic sullied sacred honor by McCarthyism, a torturing VP’s One Percent Doctrine, caged brown children and over-packed meatpacking plants profiting off poorly protected paupers essential to raw meat profits, before we can recognize the cowardice of bullies, self-destruction of electing opportunists and the vulnerability of closed minds?
Must we repeatedly elect state and federal legislatures that look the other way, basking in corporate cash flow, increasing Gerrymandering, Trump-family stealing from taxpayers, then denying adequate return of taxes paid to survive our COVID pandemic?
What will help us reject those who find color, gender and sex, grounds for dispensable branding, akin to our peculiar institution of that ol’ time religion: replacing owning humans as property, with shooting those who forget their place?
After all, 2021 raiders of the people’s house of business, did carve out the attention of a media overlooking The Street’s cashflow to corporate rented club members, swamp swapping checks and balances on presidents declaring war, for PAC checks and personal offshore bank balances, allowing Corporatism’s haters of government of, by and for the people to reward trumped marauders with objections to certifying a new president’s 81,283,098 votes.
Don’t Americans who scoff at the Mueller Report, share Old Glory’s Good Trouble history with facetime for, Stars and Bars emulation imitation and denying, Climate Change, deserve our peaceful Liberty definition update: sedition, insurrection and violence will not be allowed — despite our definitely spotty, distressingly inconsistent, yet enduring effort to honor past and present sacrifices, to preserve, protect and defend our Franklin challenge, to keep our Democratic Republic despite all enemies — foreign and domestic?
Still again, the lesson has been violently revisited, but will never be learned until we embrace and internalize, these truths to be self-evident:
- It is puppets like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Kevin McCarthy seeding chaos for financial puppeteers against government — the natural extreme of Reagan’s, Government is the Problem, whose branding iron burns in us, follow the money.
- Even a seemingly all-powerful Anti-Christ needs to cull from the reasonable, programmed pawns, knights who would be king, and rooks rooting for our ruin.
- Yet it is not the pied piper of self-aggrandizement and his easily freed to rise again armed with secret hates, envy and need for supremacy, that are the greatest threat to equality and justice for all. It is our friends, family and ourselves whose votes squeeze freedom into a electoral container just for the few.
At least two foreign flags were carried into our Capitol Building, intended to be planted into the heart and soul of our union. The responsibility goes beyond Donald Trump’s inciting violence, his administration’s incompetence and family greed. They merely exposed and elevated to new lows the oblivious disinformation of millions of Americans.
There is nothing religious, patriotic or moral about being loyal to those lacking the character of human decency. Indeed, those whose loyalties blind them to the erosion of our civility, distortion of reason and inequality of our Exceptionalism, cast themselves as fodder for demography, deceit and moral decay.
Originally published at https://thereasonablevoices.wordpress.com on January 9, 2021.
