America has long been accustomed to seeing a peaceful transition of power. Every four to eight years the people elect a new president and we watch as the handoff is made without bloodshed or violence. It's one of the reasons our country is known as a beacon of freedom throughout the world. This year, everything changed.
The violence in the capital on Wednesday was unacceptable. It was an affront to American democracy. We all know this. We cannot watch as militants storm the United States Capitol building, interrupt the Senate and the House of Representatives, and occupy legislative offices and not condemn it fully.
Violent protesters, rioters, terrorists, militant thugs, call them what you will, attacked law enforcement, shed blood, and amid the chaos, one of their own, a young woman, was shot and killed. This kind of behaviour has no place in our democratic process. We all know this, whether we harbour anger over the election result, or against injustice, we know that violence is not even the best way to achieve our desired aims.
This year we have seen too much of it. We've come to expect it, and our leaders, on left and right, have done virtually nothing to stop it. The left has provoked it by stoking the fires of grievance, and the right, in the form of sore losers who harangue us with claims of voting conspiracies seem to revel in the potential for the destruction of our electoral system.
The violence is a willing abrogation of our sacred civic duty to allow the Democratic process to work. We knew it when BLM and Antifa took to the streets burning, looting, and terrorizing, and we know it now, when we see supporters of the outgoing president so incensed with his defeat that they scaled the Capitol walls and broke inside.
Throughout the summer and into the fall we witnessed and covered violence in America's cities, including our nation's capital, and it was unacceptable. America’s Democratic leaders engaged in gaslighting and told us that the street violence was just an "idea." The willful taking of life is never something that can be condoned, and while we called on politicians to disavow it then, we call on them to do so now.
Yet each has played the fool, pretended to be ignorant as to the potential impact and result of their incendiary rhetoric. Claims of incessant police brutality and rampant racism were and are lies. The nation is the least racist, most Democratic nation the world has yet known—and we were on track to do better. These lies were the justification for mass destruction. By the same token, allegations of intentional election theft did not make room for Trump loyalists to quit the fight with dignity.
The leaders who played on these feelings are not culpable for the violence today; each individual is responsible for their own behaviour. But these leaders did intentionally lead Americans astray and they did it for their own attainment of power. The media, who provided cover for violent protests all year by using rhetoric such as “mostly peaceful,” also need to be called out.
We can say over and over that this is not who we are, that this kind of rhetoric and violence are not who we are at our base. But what has happened to us during this past year that we've spent "alone together," while leaders, corporations, and influencers tell us to be buoyed by kind thoughts, and passive platitudes, is that we have been stripped to our basic impulses.
We have spent this year in survival mode, existing in a place of perpetual crisis. It has been hard on each of us individually, on our families, our communities, and yes, it's been hard on our nation. We have decided, almost collectively, that there are no rules, that anything is permissible so long as we feel that it is so. It is not.
Our lawmakers are now likely to take up the helm and impose more restrictions. This would be a mistake. Americans are buckling under the current restrictions. Americans are being crushed by lockdowns, by the media screaming with their hair on fire, and by legislators that gaslight the public for their own ends.
What it means to be conservative is to advocate for law and order, a stable society and a functioning democracy. That's what we need to do. We must pray for peace, and live it ourselves. We know this. We know our rights have value, and that we can't take them from each other. We have the right to a peaceful transition of power. We have the right to a peaceful society. And we can't let anyone—not lawmakers or violent protestors—take that from us.
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