Usually when dealing with wrongdoing, I find the anger dissipates with time. The wrongdoer’s motives become more complex, the situation isn’t as “black and white” as I originally thought, the time to process and digest what happened cools off the original feelings of rage. And as the wrongdoer is showing a sense of contrition and a process is underway for consequences to match the wrongdoing, my sense of anger calms and I can move towards emotional equilibrium.
But I am not experiencing this general pattern with Wednesday’s insurrection. I am finding January 6 to be completely undigestible. I woke up this morning in a fog of disbelief, and when I realized that yes, in fact, Trump orchestrated followers to invade a coequal brach of government to disrupt the final certification of his loss, my anger hit a new level. I have been trying to figure out why the anger is growing instead of calming as we get further from the event. Some thoughts:
To process those events in real time we all went into a collective numbing trauma response. As we come out of it, that’s when the force of the emotions hit.
We are in a state of emergency and the coequal branch that barely withstood invasion is taking the weekend off. Yes I know actions are in motion and this week will demonstrate some swift movement when measured against normal government timelines, but I am just walking around the house dumbfounded that the House is taking the weekend off and the Senate is checked out for weeks.
Probably most enraging is the Republicans calling for unity and healing, and to underline how disingenuous they are, they usually put that phrase in air quotes. Republicans are calling on Pelosi and Biden to demonstrate unity by giving insurrection a pass. The grotesque depravity of this position is so galling I can’t begin to fathom it. If Republicans wanted to demonstrate unity, they would be repeating this over and over to their followers: “Joe Biden won the election by over 7 million votes with 306 electoral votes. The game is over. There was no steal” until it starts to sink in.
We need a massive deprogramming operation that only the Republicans can initiate among their own. To posit that the unhinged would look to Pelosi or Biden to get their unity cues is just so incredibly outrageous that I’m just going to sputter through to the end of this sentence. The GOP needs a large scale reckoning and the fact that they are making this about the mean democrats and orwellian twitter indicates that they’ve got no interest in course correction. Which spells out to me that this fight is just beginning. They continue to run the same old playbook and they have chosen to not take the January 6 wake-up call.
I dont want to turn the insurrection into a navel-gazing discussion about “my feelings,” but anger is a difficult emotion to turn to action constructively and I’m thinking that sorting out the feelings is the first step to constructive action. And when we talk about unity and healing, I wish some prominent Democrat would point out that their job to that end is to channel their constituents’ rage into institutional processes to keep our side from completely going off the rails. The government needs to demonstrate it can handle the treason of a deranged few or it will be dealing with the rage of the majority. Republicans need to reel in their own and not task Democrats with both of those monumental tasks.
Okay I’m wondering how people are doing— poll and comments….