January 6th, 2021 - A Requiem

This morning I opened my Bible app to discover it was January 6^th. Though I’d mentally wrangled with this date several times after Christmas, I realize I hadn’t thought about it recently until that very moment.

I’m unsure why because I’d spent a large chunk of 2021 replaying the day in my mind, churning it over in my thoughts again and again, trying to rationalize what I saw, trying to make any kind of sense of what happened – willing myself to make sense of the senseless.

One year ago yesterday, I told humanity from a page on The Federalist that I was going to DC for President Trump's post election rally and why.

One year ago today, I was standing on the Ellipse behind the White House in a crowd of humanity so enormous that I couldn’t have bent down to retrieve anything I’d had the misfortune to drop for the bodies packed in around me, waiting for the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, to speak to the massive numbers of humanity assembled.

It was freezing cold and the frigid, damp air crept up through the frozen ground into the soles of my feet and up through my spine like an electric current through a conduit. The wind whistled between the bodies around me, carrying our collective warmth into the sky, yet we stood together, talking, laughing, listening – one sole purpose buoying our frozen spirits – our president would address us and tell us how the country could recover a national election stolen out from under the noses of American voters as though we were easily-fooled simpletons too midget in mental acuity to discover the fraud.

HOW CAN WE MAINTAIN A FREE REPUBLIC IF VOTERS CAN’T TRUST THE RESULTS OF THEIR ELECTIONS??

This thought coursed through the minds of the assembled to the point that I could feel it around me dragging me into a singular unity I can’t imagine ever feeling among so many people at one time in one space.

Without question, the very worst part of the day was the dichotomy in disposition that occurred for me within a two hour time frame.

Though we waited hours for him to speak in the cold, the crowd was ecstatic with excitement to see the President when he finally appeared behind an enormous bullet-proof glass panel. We simply KNEW with one mind that he loved America and would do everything in his power to rectify our concerns - we were simply waiting to hear his ‘how to’ plan.

Before exiting the dais, the President asked the giant ball of humanity to walk calmly and peacefully toward the Capitol with the goal of requesting our legislators to postpone certification of the election results and, instead, wait until election investigations were concluded in contested states.

The collective roar of approval from the crowd skyrocketed into the atmosphere and hung solidly over the sea of people in a cloud of while women and men of every race and creed - grandmas and grandpas, moms and dads, teens and children  – began to move in one synchronous blob up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol building.

Once the crowd finally opened enough for our group to exit we headed back to our hotel. Few toilets had been placed for the crowd and restaurants had been closed by order of the Mayor prior to our arrival, creating the need for a pit stop before we could resume our journey.

Entering the room, we immediately heard frantic voices emanating from the television and gathered around.

There we saw a live feed from the Capitol displaying a remarkable assortment of everyday Americans walking through the rotunda taking pictures, looking around and meandering across the marble floors as though having just disembarked from a DC tour bus, while against this benign visual backdrop came the furtive, near-hysterical CNN personalities virtually screaming words like “INSURRECTION” and “BREECH” and “STORMING”.

Sidelined from our idea of joining the stream of people still making their way toward the Capitol below our hotel window, we gathered around the television with the same wonder one would have watching a ten-car pileup. The bizarre contradiction of the voices versus the visuals, scrambled the senses and made it hard to determine exactly what was happening.

Quickly we ran to the window and stared down the street toward the Capitol building convinced we’d witness the Armageddon being broadcast into our room. Nothing. We could see nothing out of the ordinary. Underneath the window an old man pushing a walker and a family with a Golden Retriever tethered to a stroller sauntered up the Avenue toward the Capitol, seemingly unfazed by the cold wind at their backs.

Clearly, no answers would be gained from our perspective, so we again bundled against the cold and left the hotel to attempt our own reconnaissance.

The entire walk up Pennsylvania Avenue had a festival feel; vendors selling their wares, a guy on stilts, a few items that looked like Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade floats, street preachers and everywhere people holding signs and flags supporting the President, America, and fair elections.

It wasn’t until we’d come within about 25 yards of the Capitol building itself that we saw anything amiss.

In front of the building, scaffolding had been erected for the Biden inauguration. I could see people - many with flags - sitting and even climbing on it. I laughed under my breath. OSHA would have a fit, but they weren’t deliberately destroying anything.

Suddenly, a middle-aged man ran past us clutching a woman – tears streaming down her face, eyes red.

“What happened?” we asked almost collectively.

Stopping briefly, he told us that some people had entered the Capitol building and that Capitol police were teargassing people. They had been teargassed on the Capitol steps and he needed to get his wife some help.

It was then we noticed the scene below the scaffolding on the lawn. People – many of whom were sitting quietly in lawn chairs – were being bombarded by teargas cannisters shot into the crowd by law enforcement around the perimeter of the building. People in lawn chairs being teargassed. I felt like a time-traveler deposited into a Solzhenitsyn novel.

The entire scene was unbelievably strange. On one side of us, an African preacher was warning us of hell and damnation while on the other side, Americans on the lawn of the nation’s Capitol were being pelted with teargas. I had assumed there would be some kind of a program on the lawn once the crowd made it to the Capitol building, yet, judging from the confused milling of the crowd, nothing had been coordinated.

Having seen enough, we fought the full frontal force of the buffeting wind back to the hotel where we warmed up, ate some of what we’d brought along with us in our ice chests and debriefed one another.

Shock, frustration, confusion and sadness permeated our little group.

Staring out the window as if a heads up screen might appear and download answers to all my questions, I noticed maybe 20 police cars, lights on, moving in formation down Pennsylvania Avenue toward our hotel. We watched in rapt attention as the cars stopped at the hotel and vanloads of police dressed in riot gear pulled up and marched out onto the sidewalk below. What in the world was going on now?

Quickly we found that the Mayor had ordered the hotel surrounded to prevent guests – now essentially prisoners – from leaving until 6 am in the morning. Had we not brought food with us, we would have gone hungry. There was no in-hotel dining, food or drinks to be had. Later, we found that friends in other hotels in the downtown area had been subjected to the same treatment. Think on the amount of law enforcement it took to imprison thousands of American citizens without due process.

Disgusted and angry, we were up before dawn, packed into the vans and out of DC the minute the clock struck 6.

Sadly – and I do mean sadly – this is only part of the story. Not only had I seen first-hand the absolute disinformation campaign waged by the corporate media, I felt the effects of their government-coordinated crusade on my person.

On the return home, we stopped at a hotel for the night. In the morning we all went down for breakfast, but because of COVID, a woman had to serve us the items we ordinarily would have gotten for ourselves. She was sweet and we exchanged pleasantries about the weather and our stay. Then she asked from where we’d come. We told her that we’d been in DC for the rally.

Her eyes grew wide above her mask and she struggled to act any other than a teller confronted with a bank robber. That moment in time is forever sealed on my brain – a living color picture of what happens when journalists become state media and produce messages to make people feel instead of think. It was at once frightening and soul-sucking.

Because I was serving as Mayor of the Town of Luther at the time, Leftists discovered I had been at the rally. Though I did two separate interviews with local media explaining I was nowhere near the Capitol at the time of the ‘breech’, the Town Manager began receiving calls demanding my immediate resignation, forcing me to post a screed to my Facebook page reminding people that the First Amendment was still found in the Constitution – and it also protected elected officials.

Just a few days after we returned, I had a message that one of our group had been visited by the FBI thanks to a Facebook post regarding the rally. They had asked the names and contact information for everyone in our group. While I didn’t – and wouldn’t have – resigned over taking part in a First Amendment exercise of my freedoms, this piece of news actually concerned me.

How do you fight the feds on a working man’s paycheck? (Sadly, all the Americans still in jail on American soil for entering a publicbuilding paid for with tax dollars know the answer to that question all toowell.)

I began to realize that – having learned I couldn’t trust the healthcare system or local government during the COVID mass formation psychosis – I now knew for a fact I couldn’t even trust the federal government with something as precious as my Constitutionally-guaranteed personal freedom.

That’s when it happened.

I shut down. I pulled my Amazon and Instagram accounts and posted only carefully on Facebook. I sat in a chair in my living room for hours a day pulling in news from all over the internet. I spent hours trying to figure out what social media platform couldn’t get yanked out from under me so that I’d lose access to ‘real’ news. I paced and questioned my husband. What do we do? What’s going to happen? Will we survive this? I had only questions without answers and only questions I didn’t really want answers to because they only went in one direction - toward the notion that I was witnessing the end of the American Republic. 

I decided humanity wasn’t to be trusted anymore. Who might turn me in ‘to the authorities’ for saying something they didn’t like? I was in a hole without a ladder.

This new daily routine lasted months and left me paranoid, unhappy, nervous and unable to do most of the tasks I usually performed willingly - happily even.

Truly, the only thing that brought me back from the precipice was reading my Bible again. Once I remembered that humans crashed and burned before we even got out of Eden, it helped put my experiences into better perspective. 

Now, every day during my reading I find something that reminds me there’s “nothing new under the sun” and that God is with us even when our government, our healthcare system, collective reason and sanity aren’t.

The one thing that gives me trepidation is this: American government was created to be ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ and that concept has blown past the cemetery and kept on driving. Clearly, we’ve reached the point of the people VERSUS the government and without a massive correction in power during the 2022 elections, the VERSUS part could become ominous. 

All I know and continue to believe is that we’ll need to be prepared to fight to protect our Constitutionally-protected rights until the bitter end - whatever that looks like.

Yes, Jesus is on His throne, but WE must be His hands and feet on Earth.