What I meant to say was, I agree John. America will never be the same. But after MAGA is done burning it to the ground, maybe just maybe we can build it back better. Where we can once again experience civility, morality, equality, respect and love. That is why I still have hope.
That is also why you may want to read Project 2025. My hope is in myself, my community, in my own ability to be decent and kind, and in people like you who see it as a personal responsibility to do so. However, I do not see us healing from the trauma and devastation of this administration in my lifetime, unfortunately. And it is not personal, its the tens of thousands of lives lost due to the destruction of USAID and other programs meant to create allyship, cooperation and world health.
Never, ever underestimate the power of racism, misogyny, and grievance on the human psyche. Not just Amurrikans. The entire world is run largely by mini-me Felons who would, if they could get away with it, do everything he and his maladministration is doing. The difference is that OUR Felon-in-Chief is so obviously deranged, demented, and sick; most of there est of them pretend to be sane. The resemblance to Robert Mugabe in his last decade of life (remember him? former freedom fighter in Zimbabwe turned into a raving lunatic dictator?) is pretty obvious. But beware the desire to rationalize the behavior of people who prefer the piece of excrement currently occupying the White House--and his even sh*ttier minions and handlers--as something that makes any sense at all. It is about the visceral hatred of women, of Others, and of anyone they can slap a grievance upon.
I understand why January 6 felt like it had to be the line. I felt that same certainty. Not because I believed Trumpism still had a conscience, but because I believed most people still had a breaking point. A moment when the cost of pretending would finally exceed the comfort of denial.
What I’ve had to reckon with since is this: for a great many Americans, that cost never arrived.
Not in their homes.
Not in their bank accounts.
Not in the texture of their daily lives.
For all its violence and obscenity, January 6 didn’t demand much from most people materially. It didn’t raise their rent. It didn’t threaten their job. It didn’t touch their insurance, their savings, or their grocery bill. It was horrifying, yes, but it remained distant, something terrible that happened somewhere else. And when suffering stays distant, moral clarity often does too.
History’s uncomfortable lesson is that ideas don’t usually move people as reliably as material reality. Not because people are shallow or cruel, but because material security is the floor that allows moral reasoning to operate at all. When that floor holds, people tolerate contradictions they’d never accept under pressure. They tell themselves stories. They wait. They adapt.
That’s part of why Trumpism survived January 6 and was ultimately rewarded for it. For tens of millions, loyalty was still cheap. Outrage cost nothing. Silence cost nothing. Even complicity carried no immediate penalty.
We like to believe that exposure to cruelty automatically produces rejection. Often it doesn’t. More often, it produces distance. People rarely abandon belief systems because they’re proven wrong. They abandon them when those systems stop protecting them. When patience becomes unaffordable. When loyalty starts sending bills.
And even then, pain doesn’t guarantee wisdom. It guarantees motion.
History is clear about that too. Economic harm makes people movable, not enlightened. Where they move depends on who’s ready with a story when the old one breaks. Hardship can open a path toward reform, or it can be routed into scapegoating and cruelty. Same pain. Different direction.
There’s also a distinction we don’t name often enough: sudden loss versus slow erosion. When people lose something they once had, they react. When they grow up never having it, they learn to live without it, often quietly, sometimes bitterly. Much of Trump’s support has lived inside that long, grinding precarity. January 6 didn’t change that equation.
So I don’t think it was naïve to believe that day would matter. I think it assumed a country still governed by shared consequence. We aren’t that country anymore. We’re fractured into zones of impact, where catastrophe reaches some immediately and others not at all.
That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. When consequences finally arrive, they won’t arrive evenly. And pain alone won’t point us toward something better unless someone is already there offering a truer story about who we are and what we owe one another.
January 6 wasn’t the reckoning we hoped for. It was the diagnosis we misunderstood. The illness had already progressed too far for shock to cure it.
What comes next won’t be decided by outrage alone. It’ll be decided by whether clarity arrives before suffering gets translated into cruelty.
Excellent analysis. The horror and bafflement of this time will need years of deep thinking such as this, and even then I wonder, will it make a difference? Most people move through life fast asleep, unconscious. They may wake up momentarily though the pull of amnesia is too strong to resist. If we don’t reach a tipping point soon where the pull of being awake and aware is stronger then the land of nod, then all that is good, true and beautiful may be lost.
We tend to imagine history turning on singular moments, a breach, a speech, a collapse, after which clarity arrives. But what January 6th exposed is that amnesia isn’t a failure of memory so much as a coping strategy. Waking up, even briefly, is costly. It demands reordering loyalties, admitting complicity, letting go of comforting stories. Sleep asks far less.
What troubles me isn’t that people didn’t understand what they saw. Many did. It’s that understanding alone didn’t outweigh the pull of normalcy, identity, and economic survival. Awareness flickered, then yielded to the gravity of daily life.
I’m less certain now that the work is about forcing wakefulness through ever greater shocks. History suggests that can backfire. Instead, I wonder if the tipping point you’re pointing toward comes when being awake feels less like exile and more like belonging, when truth offers not just alarm but a place to stand.
If anything is to be preserved, the good, the true, the beautiful, it may depend less on jolting sleepers and more on quietly building rooms where the awake can remain human long enough for others to notice. That feels slower, less cinematic, and deeply unsatisfying.
But it may be the only kind of difference that lasts.
I appreciate your skillful assessment of clarity as to why the Jan 6 event wasn't the wake up call/ deal breaker we rational people would've expected. Damn.
I’m still horrified by that day, and just as dumbfounded by how it wasn’t the red line for everyone. But I think the right wing media machine masterfully helped craft the ever changing story for MAGAs to justify & eventually disregard the entire event. The ones I know went from claiming it was Antifa to it was an inside job, to they were patriots to it was a love fest to now it never happened at all. Even saying not a single cop was hurt, they were crisis actors. The videos were all AI generated. Cult members will cling to any new ridiculous narrative to keep their beliefs intact.
I am wrapped in despair for my country, for my children and grandchildren, for this beautiful blue orb that spins in the vaster universe and all those that strive for goodness and decency,
I don’t know if we will ever recover from the destruction that began with Trump’s first election. But I see even that as the continuation of a deliberate, well-orchestrated effort by America’s extreme right, working in collaboration with Putin. I know, Russia, Russia, Russia. But it seems evident that while the rest of us work addressing climate, social justice and economic challenges, the right was laying the foundation for overturning democracy and installation of a permanent one party system.
So did I. Never thought we would allow the insurrection against our Government, Including the attacks on law enforcement to go on bc without a large opposition movement. Well it has. Thus morning the Today show did not even mention it. Only the local DC station remembered it happened. Never thought our country would turn its back on Democracy and our Constitution.
This is a day of mourning and remembrance for me. I, too, cannot fathom how so many others could have voted for him- that anyone at all could have. However, he was also aided by Putin on many levels. Aided by a powerful dictator whose goal is to topple our American democracy. A man who I suspect has very compromising evidence of Trump’s depravity that would have resulted in rejection by his base and prison time for him. Now we have cowed Republicans who refuse to support the Constitution to which they have sworn allegiance and a dearth of powerful Democrats with powerful messages. Where will it all end? Other dictators have been overthrown by their people and I can only hope we will do the same but without violence.
Keep the faith in "We the People". We must prevail and we eventually will. More are against than for and it's hard to believe that there wasn't manipulation in the voting because of so many anomalies.
The same way Trump 'support system on media platforms has been exposed as being "inflated" with fake accounts I believe the "real election results " were reported. Trump himself admitted that Elon knows his way and there won't be a need to vote any longer ( maybe).
Here's a good investigative report and if people will continue Not to further look into it I believe there won't be a free and fair election anymore:
" The Heather Honey Factor
And if you’re not already alarmed, consider this: any data funneled into SAVE now falls under the purview of Heather Honey—a pro-Trump election denier notorious for distorting voter data in 2020 in a desperate attempt to overturn Trump’s loss. She is now overseeing “election integrity” at DHS.
This is like putting a bank robber in charge of the vault. "
Honey’s history shows exactly how she’ll use SAVE: not to protect democracy, but to undermine it with a veneer of government authority.
I too, feel like an idiot, John. I thought 5 years ago was the deal breaker, fever ender for the adoration of this convicted felon con man. Yet, here we are watch him not only burn our country down, but the world. Where it stops?
But I have hope. America and Americans are resilient. When the madman is removed, we'll roll up our sleeves and build something better with more stringent guard rails.
Yes, build it back better. Looks like the coup was successful and we lost that fight but while we still have breath in our bodies we will not submit to tyranny or this sham of a fascist regime and so we fight until we win.
What I meant to say was, I agree John. America will never be the same. But after MAGA is done burning it to the ground, maybe just maybe we can build it back better. Where we can once again experience civility, morality, equality, respect and love. That is why I still have hope.
That is also why you may want to read Project 2025. My hope is in myself, my community, in my own ability to be decent and kind, and in people like you who see it as a personal responsibility to do so. However, I do not see us healing from the trauma and devastation of this administration in my lifetime, unfortunately. And it is not personal, its the tens of thousands of lives lost due to the destruction of USAID and other programs meant to create allyship, cooperation and world health.
Never, ever underestimate the power of racism, misogyny, and grievance on the human psyche. Not just Amurrikans. The entire world is run largely by mini-me Felons who would, if they could get away with it, do everything he and his maladministration is doing. The difference is that OUR Felon-in-Chief is so obviously deranged, demented, and sick; most of there est of them pretend to be sane. The resemblance to Robert Mugabe in his last decade of life (remember him? former freedom fighter in Zimbabwe turned into a raving lunatic dictator?) is pretty obvious. But beware the desire to rationalize the behavior of people who prefer the piece of excrement currently occupying the White House--and his even sh*ttier minions and handlers--as something that makes any sense at all. It is about the visceral hatred of women, of Others, and of anyone they can slap a grievance upon.
I understand why January 6 felt like it had to be the line. I felt that same certainty. Not because I believed Trumpism still had a conscience, but because I believed most people still had a breaking point. A moment when the cost of pretending would finally exceed the comfort of denial.
What I’ve had to reckon with since is this: for a great many Americans, that cost never arrived.
Not in their homes.
Not in their bank accounts.
Not in the texture of their daily lives.
For all its violence and obscenity, January 6 didn’t demand much from most people materially. It didn’t raise their rent. It didn’t threaten their job. It didn’t touch their insurance, their savings, or their grocery bill. It was horrifying, yes, but it remained distant, something terrible that happened somewhere else. And when suffering stays distant, moral clarity often does too.
History’s uncomfortable lesson is that ideas don’t usually move people as reliably as material reality. Not because people are shallow or cruel, but because material security is the floor that allows moral reasoning to operate at all. When that floor holds, people tolerate contradictions they’d never accept under pressure. They tell themselves stories. They wait. They adapt.
That’s part of why Trumpism survived January 6 and was ultimately rewarded for it. For tens of millions, loyalty was still cheap. Outrage cost nothing. Silence cost nothing. Even complicity carried no immediate penalty.
We like to believe that exposure to cruelty automatically produces rejection. Often it doesn’t. More often, it produces distance. People rarely abandon belief systems because they’re proven wrong. They abandon them when those systems stop protecting them. When patience becomes unaffordable. When loyalty starts sending bills.
And even then, pain doesn’t guarantee wisdom. It guarantees motion.
History is clear about that too. Economic harm makes people movable, not enlightened. Where they move depends on who’s ready with a story when the old one breaks. Hardship can open a path toward reform, or it can be routed into scapegoating and cruelty. Same pain. Different direction.
There’s also a distinction we don’t name often enough: sudden loss versus slow erosion. When people lose something they once had, they react. When they grow up never having it, they learn to live without it, often quietly, sometimes bitterly. Much of Trump’s support has lived inside that long, grinding precarity. January 6 didn’t change that equation.
So I don’t think it was naïve to believe that day would matter. I think it assumed a country still governed by shared consequence. We aren’t that country anymore. We’re fractured into zones of impact, where catastrophe reaches some immediately and others not at all.
That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. When consequences finally arrive, they won’t arrive evenly. And pain alone won’t point us toward something better unless someone is already there offering a truer story about who we are and what we owe one another.
January 6 wasn’t the reckoning we hoped for. It was the diagnosis we misunderstood. The illness had already progressed too far for shock to cure it.
What comes next won’t be decided by outrage alone. It’ll be decided by whether clarity arrives before suffering gets translated into cruelty.
That’s what keeps me paying attention.
Excellent analysis. The horror and bafflement of this time will need years of deep thinking such as this, and even then I wonder, will it make a difference? Most people move through life fast asleep, unconscious. They may wake up momentarily though the pull of amnesia is too strong to resist. If we don’t reach a tipping point soon where the pull of being awake and aware is stronger then the land of nod, then all that is good, true and beautiful may be lost.
Linda, its good hearing your thoughts.
We tend to imagine history turning on singular moments, a breach, a speech, a collapse, after which clarity arrives. But what January 6th exposed is that amnesia isn’t a failure of memory so much as a coping strategy. Waking up, even briefly, is costly. It demands reordering loyalties, admitting complicity, letting go of comforting stories. Sleep asks far less.
What troubles me isn’t that people didn’t understand what they saw. Many did. It’s that understanding alone didn’t outweigh the pull of normalcy, identity, and economic survival. Awareness flickered, then yielded to the gravity of daily life.
I’m less certain now that the work is about forcing wakefulness through ever greater shocks. History suggests that can backfire. Instead, I wonder if the tipping point you’re pointing toward comes when being awake feels less like exile and more like belonging, when truth offers not just alarm but a place to stand.
If anything is to be preserved, the good, the true, the beautiful, it may depend less on jolting sleepers and more on quietly building rooms where the awake can remain human long enough for others to notice. That feels slower, less cinematic, and deeply unsatisfying.
But it may be the only kind of difference that lasts.
I appreciate your skillful assessment of clarity as to why the Jan 6 event wasn't the wake up call/ deal breaker we rational people would've expected. Damn.
It's ironic that something so momentous should ultimately feel more like a remote event than the existential crisis it actually is.
This is an insightful analysis of the current situation. Thank you.
I’m still horrified by that day, and just as dumbfounded by how it wasn’t the red line for everyone. But I think the right wing media machine masterfully helped craft the ever changing story for MAGAs to justify & eventually disregard the entire event. The ones I know went from claiming it was Antifa to it was an inside job, to they were patriots to it was a love fest to now it never happened at all. Even saying not a single cop was hurt, they were crisis actors. The videos were all AI generated. Cult members will cling to any new ridiculous narrative to keep their beliefs intact.
I am wrapped in despair for my country, for my children and grandchildren, for this beautiful blue orb that spins in the vaster universe and all those that strive for goodness and decency,
Both heavy days, January 6th, 2021 and 2026 alike.
I don’t know if we will ever recover from the destruction that began with Trump’s first election. But I see even that as the continuation of a deliberate, well-orchestrated effort by America’s extreme right, working in collaboration with Putin. I know, Russia, Russia, Russia. But it seems evident that while the rest of us work addressing climate, social justice and economic challenges, the right was laying the foundation for overturning democracy and installation of a permanent one party system.
Just goes to show what terrible things morons will do when they all get together and re-enforce another morons lies.
😢
So did I. Never thought we would allow the insurrection against our Government, Including the attacks on law enforcement to go on bc without a large opposition movement. Well it has. Thus morning the Today show did not even mention it. Only the local DC station remembered it happened. Never thought our country would turn its back on Democracy and our Constitution.
This is a day of mourning and remembrance for me. I, too, cannot fathom how so many others could have voted for him- that anyone at all could have. However, he was also aided by Putin on many levels. Aided by a powerful dictator whose goal is to topple our American democracy. A man who I suspect has very compromising evidence of Trump’s depravity that would have resulted in rejection by his base and prison time for him. Now we have cowed Republicans who refuse to support the Constitution to which they have sworn allegiance and a dearth of powerful Democrats with powerful messages. Where will it all end? Other dictators have been overthrown by their people and I can only hope we will do the same but without violence.
This feels like an obit.
Keep the faith in "We the People". We must prevail and we eventually will. More are against than for and it's hard to believe that there wasn't manipulation in the voting because of so many anomalies.
The same way Trump 'support system on media platforms has been exposed as being "inflated" with fake accounts I believe the "real election results " were reported. Trump himself admitted that Elon knows his way and there won't be a need to vote any longer ( maybe).
Here's a good investigative report and if people will continue Not to further look into it I believe there won't be a free and fair election anymore:
" The Heather Honey Factor
And if you’re not already alarmed, consider this: any data funneled into SAVE now falls under the purview of Heather Honey—a pro-Trump election denier notorious for distorting voter data in 2020 in a desperate attempt to overturn Trump’s loss. She is now overseeing “election integrity” at DHS.
This is like putting a bank robber in charge of the vault. "
Honey’s history shows exactly how she’ll use SAVE: not to protect democracy, but to undermine it with a veneer of government authority.
I too, feel like an idiot, John. I thought 5 years ago was the deal breaker, fever ender for the adoration of this convicted felon con man. Yet, here we are watch him not only burn our country down, but the world. Where it stops?
But I have hope. America and Americans are resilient. When the madman is removed, we'll roll up our sleeves and build something better with more stringent guard rails.
I thought so too…
Yes, build it back better. Looks like the coup was successful and we lost that fight but while we still have breath in our bodies we will not submit to tyranny or this sham of a fascist regime and so we fight until we win.