We Did This to Ourselves
For years I’ve braced myself for a potential foreign attack on the Capitol. I never thought the invaders would be U.S. citizens.
As a child of the 9/11 era, there are a lot of headlines I thought I might eventually see. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, I thought I might see that a plane had hit the Sears Tower in my hometown of Chicago. After Barack Obama was elected president, I thought I might see that a white supremacist had assassinated him. The only thing that surprises me about a mass shooting is not the act of violence, but a particularly high death toll.
I was not prepared for this.
On a day in which the leadership of the federal government was gathered in one of the most secure buildings in the country to oversee a peaceful transition of power, a hostile element was able to overwhelm its security and get inside. In other words, an invasion.
For a moment, let’s set aside the fact that the way police treated these invaders demonstrates that law enforcement does…
