Lessons from January 6, 2021

 Yesterday,  a lot of people spent the day reflecting on the events that occurred on 1/6/21. But, what have we learned? One of the biggest takeaways has got to be that while the Republican party is still embracing the former president, they are also trying to rewrite history or, as in the case of my state's Senator Charles Grassley, are trying to move on from it by calling for unity. So, let me be clear, you can't be for both unity and anarchy unless you want us to unify for anarchy. We also have learned that Republicans were hellbent on gaming the voting system in 19 states toward their direction by adding no less than 34 new laws to the books to make it harder to vote in 2021. Believing that the best way to win is to eliminate pesky voters (and particularly those who usually vote against you), the Republicans are pre-stealing the vote so their supporters don't have to work so hard. What else have we learned? We've learned that Republicans are subjective in supporting the police. Police who are arresting BLM protestors in Portland and Seattle are good, but police who are arresting violent looters of the Capitol in DC are fine to pound into the dirt.

We have also learned that Trump and his minions are trying to control the narrative by backdating it to Election Day 2021, even though the evidence that there was voter fraud is less than threadbare (though in Florida at least 4 persons, all Republicans, were convicted of voter fraud by voting in two different states). Suffice to say that the idea is to make the case that the rage was justified because these "Patriots" were not being heard (although over 60 court cases filed suggest that their interests were well represented). These folks would like us to think that they are the real victims of a system intended to silence them. So the other thing we've learned is when a system that is working the way it was designed to work doesn't lead to the outcome you expect, the system is the problem, not you. If this lesson bears out, democracy has been lost to mob rule and that would be the hardest lesson to accept.

(Photo Credit: Associated Press 1/6/21)