Captive
This afternoon, I was mentally held captive by a group of Trump supporters who stormed Capitol Hill as Congress finalized the election. I won’t go into detail about what happened- see this summary.
Words like shocking and unsettling aren’t strong enough to describe what happened. I fervently hope that it was the last domino to fall in a baseless narrative of election fraud that Trump started seeding many months ago.
But what scares me most is that it won’t be. While the events and rhetoric since the election delivered a reality check to a subset of Americans who supported Trump, the reality is that there remains a shockingly large constituency supporting him. We can’t ignore that group, nor would it be justly American, but neither can we convince them of anything. There’s no telling how much further this narrative can go or how it will be twisted by the nefarious motivations powering it.
While the fallout of today’s events remains to be seen, they remind me of the similar but different experience of following the 2020 election. For a week, I was held captive by the slow roll of state-by-state results. When awake, I checked the Five Thirty Eight live blog hourly. When asleep, I dreamed about the electoral map and county-level breakdowns. The election hung over me like a thick cloud as I tried unsuccessfully to think about anything else.
As our Tuesday night punishment dragged into four more painstaking nights, we could only joke that “it’s too close to call.. and there’s still a lot of vote left out there...” while we wished for an end to the torture. The bitterly amusing part was that pundits repeatedly mentioned that the race wouldn’t be decided in a couple days and would assuredly swing in the Democrats’ favor as mail-in ballots were counted. But those claims did little to soften the gut punch of seeing so much red on the map. The emotions were unnervingly poetic; I was seeing red all right, but not so much as I was just feeling blue.
And if being distracted by the political insanity wasn’t enough, COVID continues to hold us captive physically. When will it end?
