January 6th

I saw the “Jesus, Boo” bubble materialize before the video finished uploading. But I knew it was bad. I had only heard this dear friend use that phrase one time before, and that was when I was precariously and surprisingly hanging off an erosion slide, 80 feet above the Gooseberry River’s rocky entrance to frigid Lake Superior.

And then I saw the shocking video of the riots at the Capitol. And “surprising” and “precarious” were once again the words of the moment.

Surprising, of course, because these things just don’t happen here. We watch these insurrections on the news from our La Z Boys, chuckling at the banana republics in far off places we often can’t even pronounce. How does this happen here? We have laws, a Constitution, checks and balances, pious, church-going, god-fearing men and women who hold the values of democracy and duty to country above all else. Don’t we?

Precarious, because we were given a 4-year reprieve by an unlikely hero, a Vice-President who had, for four long years, floundered through Washington without a spine, occasionally offering a nod or a clap when cameras were trained on his immobile face. Precarious, because the reason Mike Pence wasn’t asked to run again, when America was vapid enough to re-elect Trump, is because he stood up for the Constitution, the rule of law; put country over party, and therefore, over Trump.

Precarious, because J.D. Vance has proven himself to have no moral compass, indeed, no conscience, and no compunction against doing whatever it takes to grant him the orange glow of Trump’s successorship.

Precarious, because, this term, all congressional checks and balances will flow through a deeply corrupt Republican Party. Corrupted by Fascism, Muskism, greed and avarice. Corrupted by their own, and China’s, propaganda. Corrupted by the failure of the mainstream media to hold them accountable.

Precarious, because this term, the Supreme Court has been Trump-Stacked, owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation and other dark pools of white money.

Surprising, this term, not so much. Of course, it is surprising - shocking - that the Party of Piety allowed a sex offender and felon to run again, and even more so that almost 80 million Americans actually voted for a man that so nearly toppled our union the first time. But, now that they gave him, along with the congress and the court, free reign to continue to eviscerate all that we hold dear, I doubt that anything they do will be surprising again. I just hope I will still have the freedom to write about it.