After riot, it’s time for us all to be Americans
There is something inexplicably comforting about witnessing horrible things from a safe distance. We love our nightmares. We need our ghost stories, our dark places, our stunning realization that Charlton Heston has been on Earth the whole time, because that ruined monument behind him is the Statue of Liberty! It’s visceral — the scary stuff really scares us — but it’s safe, too. “This isn’t really real,” we tell ourselves. “We still control this. We are still in charge.”
That makes the awful events of Wednesday afternoon so disturbing, so terrifying. We watched on our computers and our phones and our TV screens, one more set of images to consume, one more scary show to binge watch. This is the way we experience tragedy these days, whether it’s the killing of an innocent Black man or the agony of hospital patients on ventilators dying of this terrible virus, or a small group of small-minded people turning last summer’s noble and necessary protests into an occasion for senseless acts of violence: relatively few of us are present. We are eyewitnesses from a safe distance, at our desks or on our couches, sheltered and secure.
That distance dampens the moment’s power: everything seems less reality than reality show. Wednesday afternoon, the remove was erased. Wednesday afternoon, a democratically elected president responded to his verified and incontrovertible defeat by inciting hundreds of his followers to storm the United States Capitol. One carried a Confederate flag. Another wore a sweatshirt, bearing a slogan that mocked the victims of the Holocaust. They smashed windows and trashed offic
es and terrorized members of Congress, all the while posting selfies and tweeting self-congratulations for their efforts.
There are a handful of places that count as universally sacred in our pluralistic, increasingly secularized, wonderfully diverse nation. The Lincoln Memorial. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The September 11Memorial. Regardless of our politics or our faith, we recognize these places as sanctified by sacrifice, set apart from partisanship.
The Capitol is another one of those places, not so much for what goes on there — the wheeling and dealing, venial and frequently mendacious occupants of that place have done their own share of desecration — but for what it represents. I’ve not set foot in the Capitol in 40 years, but every time I see its image, I remember the thrill of walking its halls. I feel a small shiver of appreciation for the beautiful, flawed system it represents and deep gratitude for those men and women who work so tirelessly to make this a “more perfect union” by chipping away at the prejudice and the bigotry and the selfishness that clings like barnacles to the ship of state. Symbols matter. Respect for the tokens of what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” is essential to our democracy.
On Wednesday afternoon, we watched a grinning bearded man walk through Statuary Hall with the speaker of the house’s lectern slung over his shoulder like a war souvenir. We saw a lumpen youth slouching in the vice president’s seat in the Senate Chamber. Another man, taking his turn in the chair, raised his arm, whether in a gesture of triumph or a Nazi salute, it’s hard to tell. A Capitol Hill cop got chased up a set of stone stairs leading into the building, while another cop posed for selfies with the rioters. Guys in camo pants and MAGA caps rifled through congressional desks, upending filing cabinets scrawling vague threats in red ink on the strewn papers.
Through the day, my sense of shock and betrayal, of stomach turning outrage is exactly what I felt 20 years ago, as my wife and I stood in front of our television set, and watched the second plane explode into the World Trade Center. This terror attack, this invasion, was an affront to all we hold sacred. It is a crime against the soul of our nation. Capitol Hill has seen its share of violent acts, but nothing like this has happened since 1814, when British troops attacked Washington, ransacked federal offices and set fire to the Capitol. That was a reprehensible act of war. Wednesday was an act of domestic terrorism.
We cannot be passive about what we watched on Wednesday. This wasn’t a scary movie. This was a terrorist attack on our system of government. That means it was an attack on all of us.
We must act. We must speak out. We must stand for freedom and for justice. We must, whatever our histories, whatever our politics, join together and defend our national institutions against the bigotry, the ignorance and the lies that threaten them.
It is time for us all to be Americans.