New year starts with rampage

Like the underestimated second son of an English title, 2021 is dangerously unconcerned with anything other than claiming his slice of the pie, casualties or not.

And he has a tattooed tummy and a MAGA hat to justify his unholy temper tantrum.

2021 is the younger brother of this disturbing political saga, so crippled by entitlement and grudge, he will set fire to the very inheritance he craves before he will accept reason. We, the defenders of the United States Constitution, bear the unlucky responsibility to correct such unruly behavior. Parenting is not for the

weak of heart.

But, instead of taking away the matches and assigning a timeout corner (perhaps a prison cell in this case), the leader of our country, just handed 2021 a lighter with instructions to march towards the Constitution.

The President did not splice words, or infer, but instead, was quite explicit. “We are going to walk down Pennsylvania Ave….and take back our country”.

Then Trump slipped quietly into the shadows of a party tent filled with smoke and wolves and listened to the growing chants of “Hang Mike Pence” and the crackling of flames a few blocks away. Incendiary cowardice at its finest.

I have seen a lot of dramatic Netflix in the past year, but despite the theatrical tendencies of this mob, we know the raid on the U.S. capitol was not theater. It was domestic terrorism.

I saw an alarming juxtaposition of clown-like selfies and assault rifles in the rotunda. Like toddlers set loose on an unchaperoned Disney park, this smug band casually rested their feet on the desks of elected officials, desecrated the halls with human feces and paraded through the building with stolen property and self-congratulatory live camera feeds.

But, like terrorists, they strategically parked vans full of pipe bombs and weaponry and erected gallows at nearby plazas.

I saw alarmingly high levels of entitlement and alarmingly low levels of character. And make no mistake, so did the rest of the world.

Americans died.

Five people lost their lives in this insurrection and there is reason to believe it could have been much worse.

As we watched masked terrorists storm the Senate floor with fistfuls of zip tie handcuffs, I thought to myself how lucky we are that the final act of this circus did not end with a line up a hostages.

This was a calculated, organized, Presidential-sanctioned coup of the United States of America and we have the responsibility to treat it as such.

U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.”

We are in the unfortunate, though not unexpected, position of making this choice.

I hope we have the courage to choose well.