I try not to make politics the center of my life even though I do have a tendency to keep up on current events more than the average person. And yes, MSNBC is my preferred network. But I was flipping between Fox and CNN today while the debacle at the Capitol was ongoing, and when even Fox is calling it insurrection...well...you've got real problems.

On some level I understand why people broke into Congress's chambers and offices. For months they have been whipped up to frenzy levels by Trump's constant lies and tweets, the stable of unstable people like Giuliani and Sydney Powell that Trump attracts, and the batshit crazy Q-people who "trust in the plan" and WWG1WWA. There's a lack of ability to grasp that their beloved candidate who fought like hell for them could be loathed enough by the remaining electorate to swing the vote to Sleepy Joe. Ergo, Trump was robbed! This is their last chance to do something meaningful and set things right!

The danger with this kind of delusion, besides a lot of nasty conversations and broken relationships, is that when it hits full-scale reality people's lives tend to be at stake, particularly when the tacticool crowd are armed, as they often are, and hellbent on either "standing their ground" or trespassing somewhere to "take care of the problem." There's a reason why a lot of commercials on Fox News involve some sort of military-adjacent sunglasses or other gadgets that make suburban couch potatoes feel like they're in a Tom Clancy novel.

I really hope that the US is done with this kind of craziness, and that storming the Capitol is a severe enough shock to the general public that people start to re-examine this kind of thinking, or at least not follow it further down the rabbit hole. As I mentioned, when even Fox is saying slow your roll you've crossed over the line and gone about 100 yards beyond.

Enough is enough. There are two weeks of Trumpian madness left but that doesn't mean we need to see things escalate again. Respect the US in word and deed, fight for your country at the ballot box or in campaigns, embrace humanity in all of its weird and wild iterations, and just stop the literal violence. There's more to us than this.