As a bone heals stronger where it broke and an immune system learns to heal when invaded by disease, we will emerge stronger. I mainly write about sustainability and cleaning the air, water, and land we share. I have never wavered from achieving these goals only through freedom and democracy.

I will do all I can to enable future historians to mark January 6, 2021 as the day we recognized our common humanity, stopped hoping for the best, took responsibility, and restored participation in democracy. Freedom is never free nor easy.

People like Trump and his supporters will always cheat a system that would thrive so much more without their parasitical leeching and lecherousness. The price we who value freedom and democracy pay is work, but as Martin Luther King said, unearned suffering is redemptive, and the value of a job well done satisfies more than something handed to us.

We are not entitled to freedom nor democracy. We earn it or we lose it, but what we earn we value more for that glorious work. Yesterday’s results were as clearly foretold in the days and months leading up to it as the predictions a global pandemic would emerge from our behavior breeding pathogens in the decades leading up to it. More so: the time, the place, the activity, the participants, the person stoking the flames. We were only lucky no one brought an explosive with them into the Capital or worse.

We didn’t prevent what we knew would happen. Let’s not make that mistake again. We have time to remove those who didn’t protect and defend the Constitution.

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It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, ”that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

• ← 2020 versus 2021
• What one person does matters. What more evidence do you need? →