(Erin Schaff/New York Times)
Wednesday morning, I woke up dancing.
I had a text message from my buddy Flip, down in Georgia.
“It just might happen…”
That’s all he needed to say.
* * *
Tuesday night, I had gone to bed early.
I figured, we wouldn’t know the results from Georgia until the next day, at the earliest.
So Reverend Warnock’s victory – in the wee hours of Wednesday morning – was a wicked, welcome surprise.
And it looked like Jon Ossoff’s lead might hold up, too.
Full disclosure: I had a little bit of a dog in the fight.
I’d donated to the Reverend’s campaign, as well as Ossoff’s, along with Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Georgia organization.
I was in the fortunate position where I could put my money where my mouth was.
And even though I’m an old Republican, I wanted to do what I could to get the Senate out of the death grip of Mitch McConnell.
Now Mitch McConnell would have a new title: Minority Leader.
And Joe Biden would have a Congress that would do something it hadn’t done in eight years – actually debate and pass legislation.
Maybe 2021 really would be a good year…
For all of 2020, my mantra had been:
There are a lot of crazy people out there. But there are more of us than them.
Not necessarily by a lot…
In November, I watched in horror and dismay on Election Night, as the votes for Trump piled up.
But just as the experts predicted, the mail-in and early votes came in.
(Not because of fraud, Rudy).
And with some patience, my mantra bore out.
Saturday morning after the election, the AP declared Pennsylvania for Biden, and we were through with Trump.
Not so fast….
As I wrote in July, he wasn’t going to leave, and his supporters weren’t going to let him leave.
But even then, I wasn’t prepared for what went down this week.
At least we can be thankful that they didn’t bring their A-Team…
As the nation has “recoiled in horror” this week, there’s one expression that I keep hearing.
“This is not who we are.”
Joe Biden used it, essentially, in his speech during the siege.
President Biden (I think we can dispense with the “President elect” at this point) said:
“The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America, do not represent who we are. What we’re seeing is a small number of extremists, dedicated to lawlessness. This is not dissent – it’s disorder. It’s chaos.”
All in all, it was an amazingly Presidential speech, done gracefully under the crucible of an ongoing coup. He was empathetic, informed, and firm in his convictions.
Already, he has grown into the job.
But I cringed when I heard that phrase, “This does not represent who we are.”
When Donald Trump was finally forced to make his odd, stilted “concession speech” the following night, going into “teleprompter Trump” mode, he used a similar phrase.
He scolded his supporters for storming the castle: “To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country.”
(Even though he asked them to do it in the first place.)
* * *
Rose Scott is the host of Closer Look on WABE, a Georgia National Public Radio station.
She was a guest a couple days ago on the NPR show, On Point.
When she was asked to reflect on the carnage in the Capitol, Rose scoffed.
“In all this self-reflection, everybody’s having this ‘cerebral moment’… to reflect on what happened in Washington DC… How many times has this nation said, ‘This is not who we are?’ How times are we gonna hear that?
You had someone tell you, four, five years ago, who he was, when he said, ‘I could shoot somebody in the street, and nothing would happen.’
We had that same someone say, ‘You see someone who disagrees with you, knock the hell out of ‘em!’
So, we’ve been here before… How many times is this nation gonna keep saying, ‘This is not who we are’? It goes beyond, ‘Do you mean it?’ It’s about execution.
You have a choice to make, America. You’ve been saying this for centuries. And you keep failing.”
That expression – “That’s not who I am” – is most often used by people who are standing in front of a judge, or before white-hot TV lights, explaining their “errant behavior.”
(Or like the privileged white gal who lost her phone this week, then jumped ugly on the first 14-year old black kid she saw, accusing him of theft, and throwing him to the ground. She used that same line in her “exoneration” interview on ABC – but Gayle King wasn’t having any of it.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about Nazi Germany lately.
There’s an expression that’s been floating around the Internet this past year:
“One-third of the German people killed another one-third of their people, while the remaining one-third stood by and did nothing.”
It’s not a technically accurate expression, and it’s been wrongly attributed to German filmmaker Werner Herzog.
But it’s not far off from what happened in Germany before World War II.
And we have to ask: How far off is it from where we are today in the U.S?
We can shake our heads in disgust at the seditionists who took over the Capitol on Wednesday, and tried to bring down our Democracy, and we can say, “This is not who we are.”
But we have to admit it: This is exactly who we are.
As Walt Kelly’s 1950s cartoon creation Pogo said (partly in reaction to the McCarthy investigations):
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
We live in a country in which 74.2 million people voted for a man who advocated the violent overthrow of our Democratic government.
We live in a country in which 52% of Republicans believe that Joe Biden is responsible for the takeover of the Capitol this week.
So I wonder…
What did Germany do with that one-third of the people?
How did they make amends?
How did they get people to change?
How did they deal with their past, their transgressions?
How did they work together to create a new national identity, that was accepted by the rest of the world?
And what do we do with the blind-rage that splits our country in half?
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
But we had better figure out the answers. Quick.
* * *
There’s an incredible episode of The Daily, the New York Times-produced podcast.
It’s an in-the-field report about Americans scrambling to buy guns before the election, fearing violence.
You’ve got both liberals and conservatives standing in line outside the gun stores, each wary of the other.
A New York Times reporter is interviewing a black guy, wearing a Black Lives Matter hoodie.
A white skinhead up ahead is listening to them, and starts yelling back at them, “BLM sucks!”
But then a funny thing happens.
The white guy starts listening to what the black guy is saying, and he realizes, he’s saying the same thing he says – he just wants guns to protect his family.
The white guy walks back, apologizes to the black guy, and they actually talk.
The black guy says, “If somebody were to attack you and your family, I’d defend you.”
“I’d do the same for you,” the white guy gulps.
That’s the sort of story that gives me hope.
That makes me think we might just find common ground.
I know, I know… sometimes it just doesn’t work.
Almost every day, I find myself gritting my teeth as I listen to the inane rantings of a Trump supporter, and I have to choke back my desire to shout them down, or do worse.
Then I remember:
If Georgia taught us anything, it taught us this:
We hold the most powerful, revolutionary, subversive tool, right in our hands.
Our vote.
Daddy Gibs 
Well done Mr Gibson. It is going to be difficult to overcome the level of hatred and divisiveness, but we will. We have as recently as the Vietnam era. It will be far more challenging now, however, with half of the country receiving daily misinformation and nothing but misinformation.
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Good points, Mr. Rodman. I hadn’t considered the divisiveness of the Vietnam era. All we can do is hang on to the truth.
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