January 6th Capitol Raid - opinion piece

By: Herbie Waters 

January 6th, 2021. As 2020 came to a close, many Americans were looking forward to the illusion of a fresh start, a better hour, a respawn point. When we reached the first week of 2021, a few days after the checkpoint, tone-setting events were on our minds - the Georgia runoff election, for instance, whose outcomes were both photo-finish Democrat wins. The cusp of this projected win, however, allowed a mob of disgruntled Americans to accelerate up their curve and land crashing down on the United States Capitol Building, bringing recklessness and the coronavirus to the home of the Senate and House. 

This demonstration, or as I would say, “a whole raid” (they brought ladders, scaled them medieval-style to enter the Capitol’s windows), is the starkest result of a lack of education from the ground up. It strikes me as nonsensical to see supposedly Second Amendment stalwarts and Constitution lovers raid the Legislative Branch of the government, as an insurrectionist mob that very amendment allows citizens to take up arms against. How would this be possible? However, when you observe that a majority of the crowd was unmasked, you can infer that they never understood how viruses spread, and instead choose to shun science in favor of conspiracy theories such as QAnon -- an example of believing in complicated, nonsensical “solutions” to much simpler, factual problems. 

Scenario: If I were told to upgrade to a computer monitor with a higher refresh rate to improve my game, but not why exactly it would, if this issue was party-line, I wouldn’t upgrade easily. If I were in the shoes of a rioter, it would be very easy for me to believe the election was rigged, that Trump won because he says he won, and that the deep state and communist Kamala Harris are working against American values. Unfortunately, that very state of mind is, if I may put it frankly, simping for a dictator, and is against the American values these supporters think they are standing for. This raid is the most devastating result so far, and I firmly believe a collective understanding of how the government works, even a partial one to the point where an event of this magnitude would only be done by a tiny minority and would never take off, would be crucial to implement through the American education system.