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A Day That Will Live in Absurdity

Reflections on January 6th

By Laura RoarkPublished 3 years ago 2 min read
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Julio Cortez, Associated Press

Two months into the Biden presidency, the memory of what happened on January sixth seems to be oddly faint in the national conversation. It's a weird thing to have happen because the 9/11 like event will no doubt go down in the history books, and will likely signal a milestone in the decline of American democracy. Still, we seem to be over it. If an event like 9/11 could completely change the landscape of American politics and spawn two shiny new wars, why did the political animus generated by this crisis pitter out in less than two months?

As Naomi Klein famously pointed out in her novel The Shock Doctrine, politicians *never* let events like this go to waste. The political capital they generate are too valuable. All-a two decade-wars. But that didn't seem to happen this time around. Maybe it was just the fact that democrats were too inept politically to harvest this event's potential. They called for a 9/11 style committee, but that never happened. That is so emblematic of the party divide too. The republicans take a 9/11 and turn it into two multi-trillion dollar wars, the democrats take it and rally the people to organize a committee.

But the democrats seemingly didn't even have the wind in their sails to organize a committee. This event should have made waves. We could just still be in denial as a nation of the immensity of what just happened to us, but I think there might be something different about this event. It was just too absurd for anyone to process it, much like the past four years, which have similarly gone right into the void as the Trump era has come to an end.

That, I think, is much more damaging than it being exploited for political momentum. This game of Jumanji ain’t over, and a numbed population is very difficult to catalyze toward real change. Then again, maybe we’re just learning to deal, emotionally, with the catastrophe that is 21st century. It feels different now than it did in 2019. This is probably what it’s going to feel like from now on.

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