January 6th Was No Big Deal—Unless You Love America

The insurrection is the dividing line between patriot and terrorist

“January 6th was no big deal. It was a nothing burger!”

These were the eloquent words of a beer can-wielding senior citizen, who through some confluence of happenstance, lousy luck, and poor choices, I found myself sitting uncomfortably close to in a North Carolina hotel hut tub.

It was nearly eighteen months after the January 6th, 2021 insurrection, and this sweaty, inebriated stranger was loudly proselytizing some Fox News Gospel gaslight version of the attack on our Capitol, detailing the apparent ways the “lamestream media” had somehow manipulated the footage, manufactured any actual danger, and completely exaggerated what was essentially a non-event that we should have long ago put behind us.

For what seemed like an eternity, I patiently endured his rambling, slurred, profanity-laden soliloquy, until finally I calmly confronted him with some simple follow-up questions about the scope and detail of the news footage, the testimonies of terrified Congress members, the accounts of badly beaten Capitol police officers, the urine-stained destruction left in the most sacred spaces of our Government, the chilling revelations about the violent intentions of the MAGA mob in their own livestreamed words.

My new poolside neighbor did not respond well to such reasonable queries, to say the least, launching into a markedly louder and increasingly more nonsensical salvo of random Right Wing talking points, ranging from supposed Democratic child trafficking rings to the sprawling “Covid Conspiracy,” to the border wall—none of which even attempted to address my questions or objective reality for that matter.

Shaking my head and showing great restraint, I emerged from our tiny shared pool of heavily-chlorinated water (and God knows what else) and walked away, glad to put some permanent distance between myself and this bloviating, intoxicated prophet of white nationalism.

It was easy then, to dismiss my hot tub intruder as some unstable outlier, a rare aberration in a nation of otherwise rational human beings; a worst-scenario case study that certainly didn’t represent most rational people, regardless of their political affiliations.

Now, three years later, it’s clear that a frighteningly massive portion of our nation is as fully deluded as he was: people fully addled by a steady cocktail of Conservative media manipulation, incendiary Evangelical sermonizing, unhinged randos on YouTube, and kindred spirits on fringe message boards.

In the most important election of our lifetimes, we are at the edge of a national precipice from which there is no returning. If we allow the person and the party who created, sourced, supported, and celebrated the January 6th assault on our Capitol to seize power, it will be the greatest collective failure in our history.

It will mean that we will have, through some combination of fatigue, disinterest, selfishness, or laziness, failed to protect ourselves and those who will inherit this place from us after we are gone. It will be an unforgivable collaborative sin.

Worst of all, it will mean that the monsters who stormed the halls of Congress three years ago looking to overturn an election, forcefully commandeer our Government, and permanently install a would-be dictator, will have succeeded. They will simply have had their victory postponed a few years.

Decent human beings cannot accept this.

Americans who take the Constitution seriously,
people of faith committed to the best of their religious traditions,
intelligent students of our shared history,
those who respect the Law of the land and the integrity of elections—
cannot be found sleeping or silent or invisible right now.

Nothing, no voting issues of preference, no dissatisfaction with Democratic candidates, no unmet national expectations can interfere with us all consolidating our collective power and using our shared voices to unequivocally and powerfully legislatively eliminate those for whom January 6th was “no big deal” (or worse, a day worth celebrating).

January 6th was a big f*ckin’ deal.

It still is.

Our national sovereignty,
our systems of laws and protective guardrails,
the personal liberties promised by our presence here,
the very bedrock of freedom and justice and equity,
the human and civil rights of every human being—
these better matter enough to the vast majority of Americans, that we speak one unified message: we will not allow fascism or theocracy a second chance to finish their work here.

If not, we will all find ourselves permanently tethered to and steered by a tiny, perpetually-aggrieved minority who have no use for facts, data, objective information, or anything resembling what this nation aspires to and claims to hold dear.

The future of this nation is a big deal.

I hope it is for you.

For all of us.