Remembering January 6

We had planned to run this morning – a Saturday long run is a tradition, the day of the week adjusted only by travel or adverse conditions – but yesterday the wind started to pick up and temperatures to plummet.  (Tomorrow, the forecast temperature is 70 degrees.)  We tried to walk on the beach for a little while but it was a cold and biting northwest wind.   

A flock of seagulls had been following a vehicle that was slowly driving on the beach – they permit 4X4s on the beach during the winter, and they often park to watch the sunset – and the driver must have been feeding them.  When we approached, they rose into the air as one and circled around chaotically, thinking we might have come to feed them, too.  The wind was so strong that some of them were suspended motionless in the air like kites.

We were inside and had gotten “comfortable” – Martha’s aunt Anne calls it “getting fluffy” – when I realized it was only five minutes until sunset.  So I rushed out to the dune-top deck and took this photo. And then I rushed back inside, very quickly.

The sunsets are almost as spectacular as the sunrises, and visible from the same vantage point, east-south-east and west-south west, and the light lingers for a long time.  I could still see a faint purple glow out over the ocean 45 minutes later.

I have let January 6 come and go and avoided saying anything about the violent insurrection at the Capitol a year ago.  We were out here, and like Kennedy’s assassination or the twin towers falling, we remember exactly where we were when I began hearing coverage on NPR.  We rushed back to the condo and broke our rule about watching television and watched it all unfold.  What a terrible day for our country and for democracy, but not an unexpected one – it was the final inevitable chapter in surely the worst presidency ever.  And it is still not over as we see most of the Republican Party destroyed, the integrity of statesmen like John McCain replaced by a pure lust for power. It is hard to believe that one year has passed, and although some of the insurgents themselves have been jailed, there has been no accountability at all for those who directed the failed coup that came so close to destroying our country.

Although we are on Sabbatical, and spend a lot of time reading and watching the sunrise and watching gulls float by, we do watch the news.  I am hopeful that the House January 6 Committee will bring it all to light, and I was cheered by Joe Biden’s speech commemorating the day and calling out “the former guy.” 

Adulation of said former guy persists in this part of the country.  There is a small, run-down house on the road to Lowes Food which we noticed last year.  It is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and into the fence the owner has jammed red plastic cups that spell out TRUMP in four-foot high letters.  (Why is there even a fence around this house?  To keep out Lib Dems?)  It is both ridiculous and ominous, as was the former guy.  And even the gale-force winds that regularly visit this coast have not dislodged the little cups from the fence.  

If there ever was a time – and I grew up in the era of the Vietnam War and Watergate – now is the time to speak truth to lies.  As Bob Dylan said so prophetically 50 years ago:

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin' falsely now
The hour's getting late.