Reflections on 1/6/2022

And I quote:

I mean, ya gotta write about it. They’ll write about it for decades. Centuries? In 2253, second graders will still learn about the day the president told an angry mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.

Quoting myself. Tonight, I looked back a year, curious to see what I wrote about the January 6 insurrection. All the usual crap… Trump’s impact on civil discourse, his racist rants, his flouting of U.S. laws. Trump egging on a crowd intent on killing Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Afterwards, I saw a break. The Republicans, the serious ones anyway, were pulling away. Fed up. Disgusted. Trump went too far.

Will they write about this in ten years? I doubt it. No one seems to care. Not where I live at least. Not in most of the country. Sure, it’s still a big story in a handful of progressive states and just about every city. But in the rest of the landscape, washed in red, it’s fake news.

It only took a few weeks. The narrative changed. No longer thugs. Patriots they called them then. Political prisoners today. A bunch of Republicans playing CYA. Denying the strong words they spoke a year ago, when they hoped to resurrect the party, restore decency. Now they’re unified against the truth.

Jesus Christ Superstar, I saw it on TV in 1976. Fourteen years old. Near the end of the movie, at Christ’s great trial, Pontius Pilate admonishes Christ with a powerful lyric that dropped my jaw and stopped impressionable, young me in my tracks. A lyric that’s been stuck in my head for forty-five years:

Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction
Die if you want to you misguided martyr
I wash my hands of your demolition
Die if you want to you innocent puppet!

This line runs through my head when I consider the state of the nation today:

— Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction, and
— I wash my hands of your demolition.

I’m almost done caring.

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