Sedition and Coup attempt

I was pretty upset with the attempted coup. I rarely watch the news, but I streamed some CBSN and CNN. As always I read the NY Times, check in on Google News and Reddit. I listen and read Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook and in her emails.

I'm not sure if I want detachment and equanimity on such days. I called my friends. My friend was blase, and my parents talked more about the quarantine and their friends. I went for a walk. 

I asked what my ideas were about America that made me think sedition and pathetic coup attempt were so horrible.

The idea that keeps coming back to me is the idea of equality before the law. To me that means that it doesn't matter who you are, we are all equally responsible to follow the laws of the land. Nobody is above the laws. Trump wrote a executive order that sought to punish protesters of lawful government, that will apply to this protest.

If America doesn't want this to happen again, they were prosecute the people who broke the law. It's not a political matter. And there's no moving on or ignoring the laws. I know a lot of laws are not enforced. I'm pretty sure everyone who drives speeds at some point. There are people who don't drive, how do they break the law? Most people fib, but that's not against the law. Most people are fairly law abiding.

I have found a selfish reason to be ethical. Experiments in free flowing ethics have lead to difficult meditating. Because we are all connected, it's considerate to follow the laws. I've found that selfishly, being kind and considerate is very important to me. When successful it can even lead to the gladdening. The Gladdening is when you haven't created a karmic debt, and feel good about your contribution to the world. Veganism adds to my gladdening. I have too many regrets in my life to feel the gladdening personally, but I wish to cut down on my regrets, and move forward in a positive way. I just feel better when I try to be nice. It's easy to imagine you have exception to the rules, but it's quite complicated to really justify breaking the rules.

I do support peaceful protests, attempts to improve governance. I don't experience the attempted coup, to interrupt the certifying of the presidency as a protest. With 5 people dead, that's not a protest, breaking the law to interrupt a fair election, one that the idea of "stealing" is preposterous, that's a coup, and Trump's words were seditious and a factor in that. 

(I find it funny that Trump told Pence he's not his friend any more like some toddler. He's going to want a pardon soon, so maybe he should be nicer to Pence.) 

Also terrible is the woman who called up C-Span and asked if it wasn't true that the election was stolen. It took people dying for her to question the death cult spin she'd previously accepted. There has been a systematic effort at disinformation that is pernicious as well. The volume of crimes and lying by the president is disheartening even for people who remained in the republican party. Most people with integrity resigned from the republican party. I respect those people. The cabinet members who resigned after the attempted coup were like the people who unbuckle their seatbelts on a plane just before it stops, they've already gone for the ride.

In my opinion, Trump is responsible for the 350K+ deaths in the USA. New Zealand had 25 deaths, and projecting it out to the USA population, that's much less than 2K. So you can basically say that Trump is responsible for whatever number we have minus 2K, which seems insignificant. Basically he's responsible for not leading the country towards a non-New Zealand result. Maybe no US president could have steered the USA to such a good result. Maybe we're too stupid or too uncontrollable or whatever it is that would make us unable to get New Zealand results. Maybe. That Trump did not try put the consequences at his feet. 

Two days later, we see book deals canceled, attempts to identify and bring to justice those who have participated in this attempted coup. 

To those who make light of it, say they just certified in the evening what was interrupted in the afternoon. There have been efforts to say it was left wing people trying to pin trouble on the right--that is disproven, and shows that perhaps they do that on the other side. It's a question how much of the protests have been right wing thugs trying to smear left wing protests. That certainly happened in Nazi Germany, and recently in America. The parallels to Nazi Germany were not lost on many. The wannabe dictator Trump has been voted out of office. On the larger level, democracy worked, but to many it seems slow and reluctant to figure out what crimes a sitting president has commited. 

Of course we don't want lawsuits and whatnot to plague a sitting president. That is a republican move to depower a president, bring up indictments that are in fact baseless. Clinton's emails come to mind. The Hunter Biden narrative comes to mind. Bill Clinton getting a blow job comes to mind. The 20+ sexual assault cases brought against Trump will have to wait for him to leave office. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he doesn't want to leave office.

Most of the republican dirty tricks are perhaps not illegal. Ballooning the deficit and then turning into deficit hawks for Democrats is one. They don't want to roll out entitlements the people get used to, so they look like they're taking them away when they eventually come back into power.

My question is will he be removed before his time is up? And will he remain in America and where will he go if he doesn't remain here? He committed more crimes than Nixon, for sure, and Nixon resigned so he could get pardoned. 

Will the pardoning laws be rewritten? Will the electoral college be abolished, so the popular vote isn't even in question? Of course some bozo can come along and challenge the vote count, but from what I've heard this last election was a quite good one. There's not even a question that Trump lost, but yet there are people that believe that because he said it, and he has claimed the mainstream media is never truthful, only he speaks the truth. So there's no checks and balances if you just listen to him.

In the end, I think what I've learned from the politics of the Trump administration is that we can't turn our gaze away from politics, as repugnant as it can be. Tolerating frustration and not knowing is a key skill in this.

I also need to understand why it appears so upsetting. In a very real way there's a confrontation of the abstract and the real. There are paradoxes between freedom and rights. The freedom of speech does not include sedition. The ideals overlap, and can be contradictory at times. The judgement to negotiate these guideposts is what governing and politics is all about. Politics is a weird combination of the abstract and the concrete. That's why it befuddles me so much.

One of the touchstones I retreat to in a crisis is the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The Buddha doesn't have anything that is specifically relevant to this situation. But I have to admit that I lost some equanimity on January 6th. I had techniques and skills to regain my equanimity, and I was careful not to act out and base serious decisions on my upset state of mind.

Two days later I can process in public some of the happenings. I am in favor of punishing the coup attempt actors to the full extent of the law. They just certified the election in the evening instead of the afternoon, and Biden can be said to have no impediments for anyone to object to, to assuming the presidency January 20th. Five people died as a result of the shenanigans, so I don't see any reason to trivialize this event. Once again Trump's rhetoric was underestimated. America's exceptionalism in foreign policy is dead. I'm not sure if I even believed in it, but to me, it's clearly not even a question. 

I want to add that I'm disgusted to the level of political debate the country has sunken to. Up to the Trump presidency the political discourse mostly was at a higher level. I hope we can go back to debate, reason, common sense and concern for all Americans and minimize paranoid delusions and conspiracy theories. As far as I can tell the Trump administration stood for undermining public discourse, the press, enriching the rich and incompetence in federal government.

For me the heroes are the women who brought the sealed ceremonial electoral vote documents with them when they had to flee.

For me the hero is Heather Cox Richardson putting all this into historical context. I just got another email in my inbox, I'm going to read now.

To me the republican party is dead, they have betrayed "rejects monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary political power; expects citizens to be virtuous and faithful in their performance of civic duties; and vilifies corruption." They will need a new leader to move forward. My hope is that at least the sedition and attempted coup forbid Trump from keeping power of the republican party and running in 2024. That is yet to be determined.