INSURRECTION, A YEAR OUT

Insurrection means “a violent uprising against an authority or government.” That’s what we saw on January 6, 2021. It wasn’t a group of rowdy tourists. It wasn’t Antifa or Black Lives Matter or the FBI. It was a whole lot of white supremacists who were snookered into believing trump’s big lie – that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

What I find deeply depressing about all this is how gullible these people are. They have fallen so far down the Q’Anon rabbit hole that they’re blind to what’s in front of them – an attempted coup by trump and his tribe.

I remember a coup in Caracas, when I was about 14. Schools shuttered because a revolution was imminent. In fact, we used to call these days off from school “revolution days.” My mother and I went to the local grocery store to stock up on “revolution supplies,” that was how she described these sprees, and the shelves were already pretty bare. That image of bare shelves has stuck with me all these years. It’s similar to what you see as a hurricane approaches, to what I saw in the spring of 2020 at our local Publix & Whole Foods, and to what I see even now, during the surge of Omicron.

Usually, these revolution days didn’t last long. Presumably the corrupt government of Perez Jimenez came to some agreement with the revolutionaries, whoever they were. Hey, I was 14. Politics was peripheral to my life.

My friends and I enjoyed these revolution days. It meant we could hang out, spend the night at each other’s houses, stay up late and sleep in because school had been cancelled. One night, my friend Lorraine and I – she’s now a diehard trumpie- stayed up really late talking about the book 1984. Another friend and I, Mary Jo, now a diehard democrat, used to speculate about what any of it meant. Why were we born into the families we had? What did we want to do with our lives?

On the night that Perez Jimenez fled the country with $13 million stolen from the Venezuelan treasury, my sister and I watched it with our parents from the balcony of our apartment in the neighborhood of Las Mercedes. I remember our dad was especially agitated. “Everything is about to change,” he said. A year later, he took retirement from Creole – a subsidiary of Standard Oil where he had worked for more than 30 years – and we moved to South Florida.

So when someone tries to convince me that January 6 was just rowdy tourists or an infiltration of FBI agents stirring up trouble with Antifa and Black Lives Matter, I kinda lose my shit. A neighbor believes the election was stolen, that vaccines are part of some wider conspiracy that allows Bill Gates to track you, that may turn you into something somewhere – alien? monster? robot? who knows? He has bet Rob a thousand bucks that he can prove the election was stolen.

Rob responded that his so-called proof had to be verified by CNN or other networks (not Fox News) who were calling for the 2020 election to be overturned because of whatever “proof” the neighbor provided.

Listen up, Mr. Pillow Guy. This neighbor may replace you!

On the 6th,  Trump was supposed to give a press conference at his Palm Beach mansion. That was cancelled. Instead, he’s going to hold a rally in Arizona on January 15 and that’s probably going to be a relentless rehash of his big lie.  I hope no network covers it.