When I lived in the UK I became familiar with Bonfire Night, the 5th of November, when the whole country seems to be set ablaze with fireworks, fires in people’s yards, and copious amounts of alcohol, not that the Brits need an excuse for that. I learned that Bonfire Night celebrates the fact that though Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament on the 5th of November 1605, he was caught, and the plot foiled. Now the Brits celebrate what for something that didn’t happen, which never made sense to me.
January 6th in America is our new Bonfire Night. On the 6th of January 2020, Twelfth Night, or Epiphany, for those of that bent, or for us more common folk, the day the Twelve Days Of Christmas song comes to an end, a mob was sent to the Capitol of the United States to try to stop the certification of the Election that unseated Donald J Trump from power. The mob broke into the Capitol encouraged to “fight like Hell to take back our country,” believing that the election had been rigged because they were egged on by a guy who in his past kept “a fixer,” and who exemplified the differences in race in America by being a white guy whose attorney went to jail while he got off from his crimes.
Is January 6th a day to celebrate in the future? Someone else is going to have to figure that out in the future. Today is the first anniversary. There are still a lot of people who passionately agree with that mob. I can only imagine that it feels a lot like it did in 1606 in the UK, when the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot occurred for the first time. For the first time, I really understand why they celebrate it.
“Donald Trump is your President, and there is nothing you can do about it,” said one of the kids on a group Zoom one of my daughters was involved in that day while in school. I heard that kid, knew that he was spewing his parent’s opinions. He said it just as I was watching the first reports of the Capitol being stormed online from another computer in the room. It was appalling to me, and a bit terrifying that there was a faction within the country willing to throw out our tradition of peaceful transitions of power, though I think Trump successfully began that when he belligerently took over from Obama. Those who wear or display “Let’s Go Brandon,” are a further continuation of those who have lost civility in our modern discourse and likely would sacrifice our Democracy for their Authoritarianism. America has hemorrhoids and rather than being discreet about them, they are showing themselves off in public.
Britain survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It endured two Civil Wars, too. Since coming back to America from Britain, it has really struck me how similar the two countries are, though the similarities seemed offset by around two hundred or so years. Where we are, they were. A taxi driver that once took me to the airport said on the drive, “Isn’t it amazing that this tiny island once controlled most of the world?” That was only about an hundred years prior. That was when, as is still the case, America was the sole Superpower in the World, a vague way of saying it is in control of most of the world now.
America will likely survive the current internal strife. It will likely disappoint China and Russia and remain powerful for centuries to come. And may she celebrate the day she did not die.