Time Does What Only Time Can Do

Patience is a casualty of this age of immediate information and too-ready opinionating.

On Wednesday, Jan 6, 2021, as all the mayhem played out, conjecture and personal interpretation flew in all directions. The Media did its thing of milking the drama, inflaming and alarming to increase its audience-share. Anxieties were fueled by What Ifs, and Chicken Little was having fits. Then the mockers and jokers moved in to laugh at the ludicrous and the sheer ineptness of the perpetrators, from Trump on down to his vaguest follower, as if no one had died, or taking the attitude that those who died deserved it.

It can be argued that many there were victims of the manipulators and exploiters of mob-mentality. How far back in time does that victimizing go? Who, besides Trump himself, should be held responsible for the body-count? For the emotional distress amplified, aggravated, and played-upon?

There were freak-outs over who won what, who scored points, who made points, or if the whole thing was essentially pointless. There was the indignation that they just walked out again, they got away with it! Of course they didn’t, any more than anyone deserved to die for being negligent, inept, even criminally misled. No one got away with anything. Because the thing isn’t finished yet.

The heat of fears and angers and the initial agog-ness has calmed and the consequences are rolling in. Maybe, in the end, some will get away with less consequence than they should, but without Trump hamstringing the responsible law-enforcement, or empowering the irresponsible, the difference between delusion and reality will be asserting itself for weeks to come: The cows will come home; The chickens will roost.