January 6th.
A day of infamy.
Insurrection Day.
The day the “United” States of America died.
Hyperbole? Maybe. But we need to have a reckoning if we ever expect to heal.
WARNING. Parts of this article may be triggering. If you are struggling with anxiety and depression, you can find information and connection to help through the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
Does anyone remember how or what January 6th used to be? For some folks, it is the first day back to work or school following the end-of-the-year holidays. For others, it marks the day they abandon one or more New Year’s resolutions—diet, exercise, no cussing, etc. For most folks, it used to be a calendar day during a cold dark month, otherwise no different from others.
For Christians, it marks Epiphany, or the day the Magi (three “wise men,” or “three kings”) visited the lowly baby Jesus bearing gifts suited for royalty. It is the last day of the traditional twelve days of Christmas, a season which runs from December 25th to January 6th. It is an imagery of the light of God’s love illuminating the shadows of human brokenness, at the same time physical daylight is visibly lengthening. For most Americans, the lights, revelry, and celebrations of Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa and New Year have been put away and life has returned to the normal beat of drudgery.
January 6th has been compared to September 11th. On December 18, 2001, September 11th was designated as “Patriot Day,” a National Day of Service and Remembrance. Both involved attacks on the United States. On September 11th, the attack came from foreigners. The targets were symbols of U.S. global dominance—the glittering world of neoliberal finance, which left a lot of the rest of the world behind (including many here in the United States) and military power. On January 6th, the insurrectionists were Americans, and the target was the seat of American political power. The Empire was attacking itself.
I have only seen my dear (and now gone) husband —a U.S. Marine, Purple Heart recipient, Army and Air Force officer (long story)—weep twice. The first time, it was a few years after our marriage, and it seemed to have come out of the blue. My husband had been a “grunt on the ground” in Vietnam, and something had triggered a war memory. He did not speak much about his experiences there and I did not push it. But this day, through his sobs, he confessed, “I have killed people.” Which didn’t really shock me. This kind of thing happens in a war, and if you returned from a war zone alive, chances are you had to kill someone else to do so. I did not ask for details, and he offered none.
The second time was on September 11th. Both of us watched the first plane crash into the North Tower. However, we had to leave immediately thereafter to meet someone at the airport (we were in North Carolina at the time—nowhere near either New York or the Pentagon). On the way, we wondered whether there had been a technical malfunction, pilot error, or pilot under the influence. (We had seen a story where a pilot in Miami had to be escorted out of the airport because be “smelled of alcohol” a couple of weeks earlier). When we got to the airport, they were in the process of shutting everything down. A flurry of phone calls ascertained that the person we were supposed to meet was OK—had never got off the ground on his end—so we went back to the office to find out that a second plane had hit the South Tower.
Spent the rest of the day attempting to get some work done while glued to the news. Like most everyone else, we were in horrified shock, but neither one of us cried. Only when we got home after work and my husband heard about the plane hitting the Pentagon—where they found an open Bible at an empty desk—did he break down in tears. Some decades earlier, he had been in that very room and knew the folks who regularly worked there.
More than once I have been grateful that my husband was no longer here to witness January 6th. As someone who literally took bullets for the United States of America, it would have broken his heart.
January 6th as Collective Trauma
The concept of collective trauma was first proposed in Everything in Its Path (1977). Author Kai Erikson was documenting the aftermath of the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia, which killed 125 people and destroyed 550 homes in a small mining community. As Erickson poured through boxes filled with thousands of pages of transcripts, he was struck by how “bleakly alike” all the stories were. Erickson concluded that the damage done was more than a sum total of individual losses. In a formerly tight-knit community, the survivors continued to exist as isolated shocked shells of their former selves, “no longer existing as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.” The defining (and paradoxical) characteristic of Erickson’s collective trauma is that while everyone is experiencing the same (or very similar) feelings, they feel alone and disconnected.
Most of us understand trauma as something that is experienced by those who are directly in harms way. The folks who lived anywhere near “ground zero” on September 11th, the folks who had loved ones on any one of the doomed flights, the folks trapped in collapsing buildings, the first responders—how many of them are still suffering from trauma sequelae today. On January 6th, our trauma sympathies extend to the Capitol police officers who stood on the front lines: engaging in hand-to-hand combat, being beaten and tased, overwhelmed by a crazed mob, “slipping on [co-workers’] blood” (as testified to by Officer Caroline Edwards). We might also sympathize with our members of Congress, some who ducked for cover under seats and put on gas masks, or were hurriedly ushered through tunnels out of the building by security. Even those of us who were never fans of Mike Pence can sympathize with the trauma he must have experienced that day.
The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration suggests that incidents of mass violence can create negative mental health issues for persons who were not necessarily present at the scene, along with tips on how to cope. So-called secondary trauma is created by bearing witness to tragedy. Studies have shown that obsessive consumption of media about traumatic events can lead to PTSD-like symptoms. If we are honest, how many of us watched as the planes crashed into the World Trade Towers over and over and over again, only to be interrupted while we watched the towers fall. One old veteran told us a story about having a heart attack as he watched this. On January 6th, CNN, MSNBC and Fox set records for daytime viewership, where over 28 million people watched our nation’s Capitol being breached and overrun during a crucial (yet normally routine and pro forma) ceremony.
Whether on September 11th or January 6th, a fairly typical reaction to a traumatic event is to obsess over if and when it might happen again. This is one of the “rational” reasons why we tend to overconsume media—attempting to understand the event and whether there might have been any warning signs. Our understandable coping and self-protection behaviors only add to the toxicity. We become hypervigilant and distrustful. Some of us remember the five-level color coded terrorist threat warnings after September 11, along with a corresponding DEFCON level posted daily at the entrance gate to MacDill AFB. Events like the January 6th Committee hearings and the Trump indictments—as necessary as they are to determine the truth and hold guilty parties accountable—also serve as trauma aggravating triggers. We feel the need to constantly analyze and remind ourselves of danger so that we won’t be caught by surprise again. I am not a mental health professional, but it is not hard to imagine what this does to the human psyche.
The trauma of January 6th was compounded by multiple lesser collective traumas throughout the prior year. Not the least was having a malignant narcissist sociopath occupying the most powerful position in the world. Then there was Covid—and Trump’s (either incompetent or deliberately malicious) mishandling of it, which resulted in (IMO avoidable) additional loss of lives. Some seventy-nine percent of Americans witnessed (on their screens at home, in the isolation of Covid quarantines) the murder of George Floyd in cold blood. On top of this is the looming threat of climate change, where the planet—our “Mother Earth” who typically sustains and feeds us—is punishing us possibly into extinction.
While January 6th may have been the most violent manifestation of a traumatic event, more subtle traumas continue to flow from it. We find out that there is a huge network of big, dark money that was behind January 6th. While the legal system plods along to address definable crimes that were committed, lawyers and lawmakers push through a flurry of legislation—some of it intended to “legally” prevent (or make it very difficult for) people (especially people on the margins) from voting, some of it intended to develop legal theories so the next attempted coup is successful, some of it to deny medical care and/or even simple human recognition and dignity to women and LGBTQ individuals, some of it to make the lives of immigrants even more miserable.
The media downplays the consequences of January 6th. Yes, it was a newsworthy event (great for ratings!), yes it was also “bad,” and perpetrators need to answer to the long arm of the law. But the temptation is to move on to the next outrage or distraction. Then there are the minimizers, who claim there is no reason for trauma at all—no more so than for any other “riot” or “protest.” Worse yet are the sympathizers calling for exoneration.
There are hierarchies of injury. The poor, BIPOC, disabled, LGBTQ, women, the very young and the very old—disproportionately bear the pain of social failures and collective trauma. Those in positions of power and privilege who would deny and denigrate (while others cream their pants with ecstasy at the very thought of) our angst and suffering only aggravate the trauma. The possibility that these people could destroy our votes, our voices, and our lives with impunity is so traumatizing we wonder if we can ever heal.
When our sensory input is overwhelmed with humans doing inhumane things to other human beings, how does that affect our view of humanity? Of ourselves?
January 6th as Epiphany
Yet, there is another possibility for the meaning of January 6th.
The root word of epiphany has been translated to mean “appearance” or “manifestation.” In English usage, epiphany means “a sudden intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something.” You could describe this as a wake-up call or enlightenment. Something that shocks us out of complacency so we make the necessary changes.
Epiphanies do not happen for everyone at the same time or place. In our story about the birth of Jesus, Epiphany happened during the time we call Christmas for his parents, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds who were urged to attend by angels (Luke 2: 8-20), and the three Magi from the East who followed the star (Matt. 2:1-6). The rest of the New Testament is the story of how the good news was spread—it took time and persistence. Likewise, it will take some people longer to recognize and acknowledge what really happened on January 6th, regardless of how much “evidence” is available in the here and now. And (as mental health professionals advise) the rest of us need to be prepared for the ensuing shock and grief. We can expect any such process to be stormy, chaotic, and non-linear.
Mental health services in the United States have been understaffed and under-resourced for decades. Following the events of January 6th, research identified a “modest but significant increase in mental health symptoms.” Has anyone attempted to schedule even a single session with a counselor lately? Unless you are suicidal, the wait time is likely to be six months to a year—even when you have health insurance. In a recent comment, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (whose usual topics are economics, inequality, unions, and labor rights) suggests that anxiety disorders are a normal—and even expected—response to our dysfunctional society. While Reich agrees that the United States should increase support for mental health services, he also argues that we would be better served by “treating” the social conditions that are making us anxious.
In The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding A Way to Heal, Mary Trump (yes, that Mary Trump, who is better known for Too Much and Never Enough) argues that our nation’s failure to deal with the racism that led to (and survived the end of) slavery has resulted in the dysfunctional race relations we still have today. It is not just racism and white supremacy that survives: the very notion that those with wealth, power, and privilege should be allowed to expropriate the labor of others for maximum profit at minimum cost manifests today in the form of stagnating wages and decimated labor unions. Whites and Blacks thus view each other as competitors for increasingly meager scraps instead of natural allies against “The Man.” Many White people were “awakened” to the reality of police brutality against Blacks as they sat at home during Covid quarantine and watched the murder of George Floyd—notwithstanding that BLM social media had been ablaze for months over the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.
A standard therapy technique for dealing with trauma is to “change the stories you tell yourself.” This does not mean that you deny the trauma, but that you experience it from a different perspective—not as a victim, but as a survivor. As a nation, this would mean changing the national narrative of American exceptionalism and jingoistic hubris by being honest about where we have failed. We have created a system that works very well indeed for a small minority, but not so great for all the rest of us. We need to confront the issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the context of a history of exploitation, extraction and expropriation of the land and labor of others. Some will shriek that this is “unpatriotic.” Yet, one of the most honorable things anyone (or any nation) can do is come clean and atone for the sins of the past.
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.
Hannah Arendt
Repentence and Reconciliation
Following the defeat of Hitler in World War II, the Psychological Warfare Branch of the United States Army attempted to shame and blame the German population. The objective was that, by instilling a sense of collective personal responsibility, the Germans themselves would prevent the recurrence of Nazism. Posters were plastered everywhere with photos taken inside concentration camps, along with headlines that shouted, “These shameful deeds are your fault” (Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld!). A 1946 article in The American Journal of Sociology (Vol 52, No. 2) suggests that a great majority of Germans admitted that they knew at a minimum that the camps existed, although there may have been denial about the more gruesome details. Even today there is dispute among Germans about the comparative degree of genuine ignorance, deliberate denial (willful blindness), support of the regime, and voluntary participation in the atrocities. On May 12, 2012, the German Medical Association finally apologized for its role in the inhumane experiments performed by the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele.
Reconciliation takes time. Repentance might not ever be forthcoming from the actual perpetrators, but emerge decades later from the perpetrators’ inheritors, who have (hopefully)either learned the lessons of history or evolved. However, nearly eighty years after Hitler was defeated, we are again seeing a resurgence of Nazism globally. Indeed, Nazi and pro-Hitler iconography was on display quite openly on January 6th. Perhaps such evil is so embedded in human nature that we can never expect to be rid of it. Yet, as a nation we need to be resolved and unambiguous in promoting the message that we (collectively) will not tolerate this. Even if this message has to be periodically renewed and re-broadcasted. This is something that could be incorporated into recurring post-January 6th memorial ceremonies. Never Forget.
One could argue that September 11th and January 6th are false equivalencies. January 6th did not have near the number of deaths, injuries, and level of property destruction. Nor did it present with Hollywood-style disasters like plane crashes, explosions, and buildings collapsing. Yet, on some level it is more terrifyingly insidious—like in a horror movie when the cops discover that the phone call is coming from inside the house. The poison of January 6th infiltrated even our small town on the Western edge of Minnesota. On March 19, 2021, the Minneapolis FBI arrested a home-town boy (one of the few folks at the Capitol that day who were from MN) on charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct. The. Terrorists. Live. Here. Now.
During the Trump years, a local mosque was defaced with hate messages. A local synagogue received bomb threats and had to involve the FBI. All of us have heard about more than one African-American church that has been the target of a hate crime. As a progressive Christian church which is part of a local Interfaith Alliance, a number of us showed up in support and solidarity when these events happened. But nothing hits home like when your own house of worship becomes a potential target. Which prompts the question of why should any of us be exempted from the terror and trauma that affects others in our community—or in the world—day in and day out. No one is entitled to the privilege of living in peace and comfort until everyone else is allowed the same.
In People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (1983), Dr. M. Scott Peck argues that lying, “covering up,” and denial of a bad deed is a worse “sin” than the actual deed itself. In this case, the example is events connected to the Vietnam war, but today it could apply to the war in Iraq, or Trump’s Big Lie about the election—which continues to have traction even after January 6th, Committee hearings and court rulings. If we don’t have a national formal reckoning over January 6th—along with the associated problems of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, obscene economic inequality, big money in politics, and the glorification of hate and ignorance—we will never heal. Our country will probably not survive.
Our democracy needs it.
Our collective sanity and human decency require it.
