Thursday night’s Jan. 6 hearing was a balm to the excruciating collective gaslighting our country has endured since the 2016 election. I watched every second, often literally on the edge of my couch, as two elected leaders who couldn’t be more different — an African American Democrat from a part of the country, where, as he put it, people justified lynching and a conservative woman from Republican royalty who famously opposed gay marriage despite having a lesbian sister — laid out the plain facts of what led up to and what actually transpired on Jan 6, 2021.
This wasn’t like a State of the Union address in which the president speaks and the opposing party offers a rebuttal, false equivalencies be damned.
There was no counter point because the House Select Committee laid out the facts they uncovered in hundreds of interviews, hours of video documentation and social media communications about violence many of us witnessed on television in real time.
But much was revealed in that first hearing and more will come out in the hearings this month that we did not witness because it happened behind closed doors or otherwise out of the public eye. Some of the revelations were a deeper perspective of what we saw with our own eyes.
Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards described on Thursday night, in a voice sometimes shaky but never breaking, her experience inside the violence we watched on television. We heard rioters hurling epithets and battling police, but we didn’t know that Edwards found herself slipping on fellow officers’ blood under her feet.
Edwards testified that she was trained to keep the peace, to restore or maintain law and order, but she was not trained for war. This was hand-to-hand combat, she said. This was like a war.
While I always felt Jared Kushner was a villain on par with Draco Malfoy, whose complexion Kushner calls to mind, I didn’t grasp just how lacking in human empathy he is until I saw the clip of him dismissing White House lawyers pleas for someone to intervene in Trump’s plot to thwart the peaceful transfer of powers as “whining.”
Even when we’ve had people in the White House — from the president on down — whose policies I detested, there was always at least a sense that they were in it out of a sense of commitment to our democracy. The Trump administration was filled with self-centered narcissists in it for themselves alone. It’s breathtaking how little they cared about our country, its people or the Constitution that is the foundation upon which it all rests.
All of that was revealed in the two impeachment hearings, the leaders of which, U.S. Reps. Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, went a long way in repairing our battered trust.
It was no surprise to me that Raskin received more than one standing ovation when he was at the Town Hall with his colleague U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern at First Churches recently. I highly recommend his book, “Unthinkable,” in which he courageously examines the signs he missed leading up to the death by suicide of his beloved son, Tommy Raskin on Dec. 31, 2020.
Six days later, Jamie Raskin showed up for work because he felt duty bound to participate in the joint session of Congress to accept the certified ballots that put President Joe Biden in office. We all know what happened that day.
Raskin’s book explores the lead up to and aftermath of that terrible day for our nation, closely examining all the signs he (we) missed as if it were a suicide autopsy. So many of the signs of the insurrection are so clear now, in retrospect. But as with suicide, our denial kicked in so even when Trump tweeted: Big protest in D.C. on Jan. 6th. Be there. Will be wild! we couldn’t comprehend what that might mean — what it did mean.
What we didn’t know then was that the tweet went out after Trump had met privately with sycophants who discussed seizing voting machines and invoking martial law.
Raskin is a hero to anyone who craves an elected leader who speaks about facts and acts upon them according to their oath of office.
Which brings me back to U.S. Reps. Thompson and Cheney, chair and vice chair of the Jan 6 house select committee. They each spoke movingly about the oath they took to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Tragically, it’s clear that at this point in our nation, the greater threat to the Constitution and therefore the country, comes from domestic enemies masquerading as patriots.
I highly recommend everyone watch the Jan. 6 hearings because they are not at all simply telling us what we already know. What you will learn about how dangerously close we came to losing our democracy will give you chills. It should give us all pause, no matter our party affiliations.
You can watch the hearings live at this link. While the first hearing was held during primetime, and a second hearing was held Monday morning, there are two more this week on Wednesday at 10 a.m. and Thursday at 1 p.m.
Cheney and Thompson might have at one point considered each other enemies of a sort. But understanding what’s at stake and accepting their responsibilities, they overcame their differences.
The question is, can the rest of us?
Laurie Loisel lives in Northampton.