The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Yesterday I got one of those calls I really hate to get, the ones where the caller asks if I have my TV on. Last times I got one of those the Trade Towers had been hit by commercial jetliners and the Challenger had blown up after launch with all on board. Nervously I turned on the television. Had Trump bombed Iran?

Or maybe it was just the earth shattering news that Georgia had elected two Democratic senators in the runoffs. Good news for me, maybe not for Moscow Mitch. But I didn’t really expect to get good news and for once I was right. The screenshot of the first channel to pop up was like the movie World War Z where the zombies are crawling on each other’s backs to scale the barrier walls protecting the humans on the other side. Mobs of folks were storming the nation’s capitol building where, I knew, Congress was in the process of certifying the electoral college votes. Giant Trump banners and American flags and Confederate too were dragging the ground as the mob pushed up the stairs, clambered over the walls, climbed the scaffolding, a seething angry wave of people surrounding the Capitol, breaking windows, breaching barriers, busting down doors. The news moderators were incredulous. So was I.

Cut to a few scenes inside. Legislators on the floor, huddling with their cellphones, fearing for their lives, gunfire in the background. Protestors dropping into the chambers from above, sitting in the office chairs of Senators and Representatives, smashing glass while the Capitol police aimed revolvers in their faces.

When the first Tower collapsed, I still remember the feeling that this couldn’t be happening, all those people inside descending to streetlevel, all those people dead. Could a skyscraper collapse like that? Watching the chaos inside the Capitol Building, I thought the same thing, can this be happening? Where were the National Guardsmen, the DC cops, the Secret Service? Could rioters just walk right in while every Senator and Representative were inside, trapped and at their mercy? Could this happen in America?

Well … yes it can. The President, the same fellow who’d spoken to these folks earlier and asked them to take their grievances to the Capitol, watched it, just like you and me, on TV. His attorney, the former hero mayor of the city of the Twin Towers, had urged them to resort to ‘trial by combat’ if the phony elections giving Biden the win weren’t overturned. Whatever we thought America was yesterday, it isn’t the same today.

What it will be tomorrow is in the hands of the people who enabled the Man in the High Tower, knowing all along he was unfit to be the leader of a democratic country. Courage may be in short supply, but the fear they felt yesterday might be the greater catalyst.

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