January 6

Never again

January 6

Five years. What can we say about this day of horror, of infamy, of treachery, that hasn’t been said already?

And yet we must never become inured to this violent moment of reckoning. We must remind ourselves of it every year, tell its story, and teach our children. We must place it in the category of “never again.” And then we must fundamentally rethink the systemic principles of our fragile republic to make sure that it never happens again.

Which makes it all the more difficult to fathom that we now live in a nation where the very facts of the greatest threat to American democracy—arguably since the Civil War—are in dispute. Where we endure daily reminders that the perpetrators of that violent insurrection, and even more blood-curdlingly those who masterminded it, incited it, and benefited from it, have not only been absolved of their sins against our laws, traditions, and polity, but now taunt us, and our history, with their return to power.

January 6 was a day of such shocking disruption to all that we believed was inviolable about our national identity that we are still struggling to make sense of its lessons, and of the unimaginable series of events that followed and brought us to this point.

But sometimes, in the affairs of nations and peoples, repercussions echo across time between the act and its resolution. The fury so many of us feel—the deep sense of injurious injustice over those who stormed the Capitol and those who sent the mob, but also over the rending of the bonds of our tradition of peaceful transfer of power—these are passions that, like hot embers, are not easily cooled.

This regime is illegitimate at its core, so corrupt in practice and in being that it cannot hide its fraud from the truth. We are still in the midst of the war for our future that this day precipitated. And we carry the images of that violence, and the absence of accountability, with us as we march, organize, and vote. We will retake our government and our future because this level of abhorrent incompetence and cruelty is not sustainable.

And when we do, we must ensure that every textbook tells the truth of January 6. That the images of that day are on loop in permanent exhibits at places like the Smithsonian, the Capitol itself, and—more importantly—embedded in our national consciousness.

The story is not a difficult one to tell. We elected a tyrant who hated America and all it stood for. He tried to destroy the country, and for a time, in a moment of turmoil, he succeeded in returning to power. But like almost every tyrant in history, he was ultimately defeated and is remembered with the disdain he deserves.

And we, we the people, rebuilt and reimagined our country to ensure that this terror would never reconstitute itself in the more resilient democracy forged through our reckoning.