I’m looking forward to watching the Jan 6 committee hearings live on TV. But not everyone is.
Figures. The people who need to hear the truth most won’t get a chance.
Thinking about those hearings gives me a chance to shake my head at how crazy the last 2-3 years have been. Starting in late 2019…
- My brothers and I intervened and removed my Dad from his home and his painkiller addiction. A very traumatic few months.
- Then pandemic began. Two years of lockdown, confusion, fear, death, mask and vaccine drama. I can only compare it to a World War, though the pandemic divided the country rather than uniting it.
- During the pandemic I had my first and only (knock on wood) major surgery, a knee replacement.
- And during the pandemic I made two cross-country drives to see the kids and grandsons, drives I never would have taken otherwise. The first one in particular was strange – we knew really nothing about COVID then except that people were dying. I drove through a vast, silent countryside.
- In late 2020 we saw the four pestilent years of Trump end with the election of President Biden by over 8 million votes.
- We didn’t see, but now are hearing about, a furious behind-the-scenes attempt at a coup by Trump and his minions in the run-up to Jan 6 2021.
- Then on that January 6th we saw a Trump-driven mob overrun the Capital and try to stop the legal transition of power – an insurrection. It was surreal.
- Now we’re going on two and a half years of working apart, working only via video conference, after which work practices will never be quite the same.
- And after all that, we now have to deal with Russia threatening the world again and the US in the thrall of gun culture and unacceptable gun violence. And expensive gasoline.
That’s quite a list. I wonder if all that trauma is part of the cause of the rapid increase in mass shootings. The whole world went through some of what we did (the pandemic and the messy departure of Trump, not my personal stuff), but the US is the only place in the world with more guns than people. Traumatized people act out, go crazy, and grab the nearest gun. It’s a theory.
Whether the theory’s correct or not, I’m ready for a few years with a lot less drama.