I watched the NYT video diary “Day of Rage” about Jan 6th Capitol Riots yesterday. It sickened me to my core. To me, that day was more shocking than 9/11 (not to minimize the impact of that day or the loss of life at all).
Maybe it is the rose colored glasses of disillusioned, Gen Z, youthful hubris, but, forces from outside our country attacked us. The way that I coped then, and still do today to an extent, was to believe it was “business as usual” that external forces attack other countries. As awful as that is, that’s human nature.
January 6th, 2021 was something much more different and much more impactful to me. This was OUR OWN CITIZENS attacking an institution that, despite all of its flaws, is a symbol of the bedrock of working government. It was a security blanket in a way. No matter how awful things get, The Capitol and The White House, we all agree as patriotic Americans, that those institutions, those halls where so many historic people, both great and terrible, have walked are not exactly sacred but at minimum respected. The history of the buildings; both without and within. The struggles and the setbacks. The victories and the losses. The soaring triumphs and the abysmal depths.
The story of us.
And they literally smeared feces on the walls of our collective story.
Destroyed windows, doors, left violent notes, chanted for the death of elected officials of both parties. All while in the very halls that have always afforded the overwhelmingly white mob the ability to travel unfettered, gather peacefully, air their grievances, and a slew of other rights that other races have had to literally fight and die for.
January 6th wasn’t some “tourist visit” or “love fest”. It was brutality. It was the sins of American’s haughty, jingoistic, overestimated exceptionalism laid bare for all to see.
We need to understand what happened that day. We need to ask the hard questions.
Why did this happen? How did it get this far? Who knew this was coming and why was so little done to stop it? Where do we go from here?
To whitewash the evil of that day will do a disservice to future generations. We’re engaged in a propaganda war in which one side seeks to comfort the simmering collective gestalt fears that America was and is not Great in the way Former Guy’s followers see it. The other seeks to reinforce the uncomfortable truth that America has committed genocide of Native populations, disenfranchised minorities for centuries, conducted brutal campaigns of conquest and colonialism, performed numerous war crimes, and, set up a system of government and justice that is, at its core, heavily slanted to serve white people.
The link between what Conservatives are trying to do with the whitewashing of the Capitol Riot and the refusal to understand or allow the teaching of Critical Race Theory are two sides of the same coin.
The Riot narrative refuses to acknowledge responsibility for the events of that day in the hopes that future generations will see it as a curious footnote on a history test; not a call to do better. The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Right and their toxic ideology. To speak the truth would be to admit that their ideology, as it still is today, is very much in line with authoritarianism, hatred, bigoty, and a willingness to literally bash windows in and hang those that don’t bend to their will. They are writing our current history to protect themselves in their future.
They refuse to acknowledge the truth of Critical Race Theory so they can protect the lies of their past where the white saviors brought “civilization” to a “savage” land and made a Shining City on the Hill where everyone can succeed. They do not have to face the reality that the privileged world they live in is, well, privileged. You can’t feel bad about yourself if you believe that you’ve done nothing wrong.
America has a well documented history of ignoring its demons and believing in its own excellence. Now, this time, we have a chance to right two wrongs: to tell the truth about what happened; not only in our present, but in our past as well.
What really makes America great is the ability to say, “I love my country, but it, and I, can always do better”.
That’s patriotism.