History IS Personal--- A Retrospective Two Years Later
History IS Personal--- A Retrospective Two Years Later
Two years ago today, Martha Rosen called out to me in the kitchen to tell me that Trump's fascist mob had broken through the Police security fences and was storming the Capitol. I dropped what I was doing and sat down to begin writing. The short piece linked below ("It Has Begun") is what came out in about ten minutes, all in a rush almost without thinking.
https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2021/11/it-has-begun-written-on-january-6-2021.html
It was one of those singular events like the JFK assassination or 9-11, where time itself screeches almost to a halt, and in your mind's eye you can see the events of past years and thousands of words and conversations scrolling by all at once in slow-motion, like a film, playing over and over on a loop, and each time seeing it, it is as if it were the first time and you see something different.
Has anyone else had this experience? Is that just fear, neurosis, PTSD, an anxiety attack, some other kind of psychological break, or is it something else? Something metaphysical, a karmic connection?
For myself, politics and history have always been personal. I see the faces of those people who are both the victims of injustices, and those who are rewarded for their goodness with the joy that accompanies realizing their life's aspirations. When you lose sight of the welfare of people in trying to sort through political issues and ideas, you lose your purpose for doing it, and justice becomes an abstraction.
Some might find reason to criticize the extent to which I inject myself into the news stories about which I write, and my sometimes edgy style. Personal experiences, memories, visceral reactions and opinion, even hunches factor in to much of my day to day asessments. Therefore, on this day, I could not be a "reporter" or a journalist analyzing dispassionately the scene unfolding in front of us.
What went through my mind was that after three years of warning specifically about the danger of this type of crisis in a virtual vacuum, writing and speaking with a small handful of friends and readers, that the political life I had left behind ten years before had pulled me all the way back in, seemingly against my will. Then after thinking about it for a bit, I relaxed and thought "why fight against myself, this is who I am anyway?"
I also knew that since I had this track record, that I had a responsibilty to say something about what I thought it meant for each of us, also on a personal level, and to speak to those deeper truths that others avoid because they are afraid of sounding extreme, offending others, losing friends.
I think I was not alone in realizing that this was a life-changing event, starting that day, because the world around us had fundamentally changed. Therefore the time for measured, diplomatic and analytical language was over, and someone, some group of people needed to cut through the bullshit of popularly accepted academic opinion, and say those things which people needed to hear, even when they didn't want to hear it. "Information" in that sense was not good enough, and since Martha and I had been through decades of political wars, we felt the need to provide something that was difficult to find elsewhere. Which is not to try to answer the question "what happened," rather the one, "now what do we do?"
That is what you'll continue to get from here. You all deserve nothing less.
January 6, 2023
