Remembering January 6, 2021
How Could This Have Happened in the US?
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 14 seconds“Please turn on the TV,” my wife said as she settled into her favorite recliner. “Why?” I started to ask, but she cut me off. “Ana told me they’re attacking the capitol!” I reached for the remote, and as I flipped through the channels, I saw images neither of us ever thought we would see. Is that a gallows?” my wife asked horror in her voice. Before I could respond, the camera switched to footage of people scaling the walls and forcing their way into the building. We both sat silently, the unspoken question of “why” hanging in the air like toxic cigar smoke. We turned off the TV. My wife went back to calls and Zoom meetings. I cleaned my workspace and tried to understand what I had seen.
My wife had received the update just a few days back, and after waiting for almost seventeen months, we finally got the news we had been waiting for – Cancer-free at last. However, within a fortnight, things her health changed for the worse while the events we watched continued to rivet the nation. In just three months, she had to come back home for hospice care. Despite this, the intense memories of the events of January 6 were still very present. However, during her hospice care, I decided to push away those images and focus solely on being the best caregiver that I could be.
It has been three years since the events caused great turmoil and division in our nation. The memories of those days still linger in my mind and heart. I deeply miss my beloved wife, but I know that the current state of the world would have been complex for her to comprehend and cope with. Every day is a struggle for me as I try to understand how such events could have occurred. I learned about the peaceful transfer of power in my civics class over sixty years ago, and it was a defining characteristic of our democracy. Unfortunately, recent events have shaken the foundation of what made the United States a respected leader worldwide. How did we go from “E pluribus unum” to being sliced and diced into factions that cannot speak to each other?
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Memories of January 6, 2021
How Could This Have Happened in the US?
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 14 seconds
If I were a gambler, I would have wagered that Jan would survive longer than democracy.
Four months later, it was the morning after her funeral. Democracy is still on life support.
