January 6th will stand in our minds as a frightening spectacle of unbridled violence and anarchy against our democratic America. Like all infamous days in our cable-news-social-media-in-your-face culture, visceral horror flooded our feeds, our lives, our living rooms, and rippled into the political arena like a firestorm not giving one hoot who or what it destroyed. And we all watched. For hours. Days. Weeks. Months. We watched as that horror was debated and dissected; as all the wordage like insurrection, coup, riot, protest and sedition were argued between politicians as if words still mattered.

Like so many of these hard dates that now populate our collective history, December 14th 2012, September 11th 2001, April 4th 1968 and August 6th 1945, January 6th 2021 was a nightmare that still causes us to sweat; yet we remain stagnant. And worse still  the Republican Senators and Representatives who by all accounts aided and abetted the criminals who desecrated our Capital are on the federal payroll, yes, still. And, even worser, the man who commanded the day, still perpetuates his lies to his mob. Should we really call him the former President? Can you even? Without any shame for America? I  think demagogue might be a more apt title.

Who thought that the days or weeks or months or years after the Sandy Hook massacre on December 14th, 2012, would lead to nothing? That instead of taking action to create tighter gun control laws, million and millions of more guns would be gathered by citizens incapable of keeping their weapons in locked cabinets and away from those not mentally stable enough to own such killing machines? Not me. I can’t come to grips with the fact that parents will rise up over the wearing of a cloth mask that might protect their child while attending school, but not care at all about those same children going through regular drills to avoid being gunned down during a math lesson. That part they are okay with if it means that grandpa can buy another hand gun or semi-automatic for Johnny.

Like so many I became obsessed watching the news after January 6th, thinking, albeit foolishly, that this was it, this would be the undoing of the whackos declaring a victory for a loser. Once blood was shed, I exhaled in grief, but in the full trust that I still harbored, and waited for justice to arrive on the scene.  But here we are America. In the frozen winter of our dark days, with neither sense or sensibility on our horizon. One year later, and the wall built by that lie looms larger than we might be able to scale.

Today I grieve. For those who lost their lives defending our Capital. For those who lost their belief in our Democracy, their hope in our Justice system, and for those, like me, who are losing their vision of our future.