In 2021, on three consecutive Wednesdays in January, in a trium of blood-bound events, we survived a catastrophe, we served a correction, and we held a celebration. Democracy is, at times, a gory and brutal mess — an angry boil in need of lancing — and sometimes in need of a realignment of values based on the witnessing of a live horror, in real time, as we are confronted by the monsters some of us have become in the lighted dark of day.

INSURRECTION
First Wednesday: January 6, 2021
The incredible insurrection that took over the United States Capitol was both stupefying and dismaying on many levels — how could we, as a country, have devolved into that blighted spectacle? The anger and hurt of the insurrectionists was palpable, but their rationale for invading a ritual in a sanctuary was not. The insurrectionists used violence to press their way inside, and once they pierced the veil of their expectation, they were just plain lucky proper violence was not used back against them, or their death, and their bloodshed, would have been monumental.

The insurrection tempted the death in life, and only through grace and patience, were the insurrectionists spared the winnings of their treasonous attempt to overthrow a democratic election. The only patriots there that day were the officers who held their justified fire.

IMPEACHMENT
Second Wednesday: January 13, 2021
Justice arrived quickly against a president who incited an insurrection against the legislative branch of Congress. The festering carbuncle was flayed and drained. The impeachment of Donald J. Trump was earned, and resurrected, for a second rising, and a semblance of morality was restored to Washington, D.C. and to the people of, “We the People.”

History was written, uncomfortably perhaps, in a necessary correction of what must never be allowed to happen again; no second reichs.

INAUGURATION 
Third Wednesday: January 20, 2021
Order was restored with the swearing in of Joe Biden as president. The people spoke. The people won. The election was not stolen from anyone. That’s the truth. The truth is true. Facts change, but the truth is forever stolid. Always beware of the indicted enemy who uses the lie to lace deceit over the bones of a miscreant sworn to protect us and who then liberally betrays us.

We also must provide some salve of comfort to Donald Trump, who publicly demonstrated his weakness of character, and his lack of moral alacrity, and who completely understood he would never be able to attend to a peaceful transfer of power; and so it was in his best selfish interest, and in ours, that he stay away and go away. And so it was, and so it shall be.

All Our Wednesdays
As the leftover of January flows around us, we are abandoned to reflect upon what almost happened to us as a nation, and what has happened to us as a people. What’s happened, happened; but what happens tomorrow is up to us, but we cannot make that decision alone. We need to make that decision in consultation with each other; even with those who disagree with us. Our effort can take us far, but sometimes not very distant, because some people have no interest in us, and they prefer no clue to the remainder of us.

Of those disassociated folk, we wish them well, and we allow them to abide their demise in their own time alone, unruly, and lost in the uncommon dark hatreds that have divided many people across thousands of years. We cannot win over everyone into compromise, but we must always try, try to restore the core of us, try to remake the middle of us, try to share the center of our shared minds and human mortality, because without that effort, we just fall apart into disarray, and we slowly die through disabuse.

Let us hope January 27, and all our Wednesdays thereafter, will be kinder to us. However, with a tempered sensitivity to the human condition, we must always expect what comes next might just be worse than what we could have ever imagined. Our innocence is not lost, it has been tossed. We survived four years together in the wilderness, and we shall always persevere over all the agents of distrust who actively chose to cut us apart instead of binding us tighter together.