January 6th Insurrection: After 1 Year What Have We Learned?
January 6th Insurrection: After 1 Year What Have We Learned?
2021 aka 2020 part 2
It is the first day of 2022 and I am struck by how 2021 just seemed like an extension of 2020. I remember how the people in my personal and work circles all were breathing a sigh of relief a year ago. 2020, the year of the pandemic was over. We had a vaccine; we were going to make it through the winter wave. The uncertainty of a Trump presidency was over. Biden, who regardless of your views of him politically, all could agree was going to be a much more stable president. If a news anchor started a sentence with “Biden today said…” one would not immediately think, oh what fresh hell is this?
For me, working as the emergency planning officer for the Medical Examiner’s office in Washington D.C. I certainly did not feel like the campaign was over. The day before Christmas Eve I had spent the evening on the phone with a colonel of the DC National Guard discussing staffing support to assist us in body retrieval. The fatality rate from Covid had reached the point, once again, that we were struggling with body retrieval and release to funeral homes. We had put the disaster morgue site we had operated from April to July back on ready standby and our hope was that with National Guard assistance we could keep the throughput of Covid fatalities at a high enough level we would not need to reactivate the disaster morgue for storage of the dead.
Also high on my “to do” list was Inauguration planning. However, at this point, due to the high Covid numbers, the activities around the Inauguration had been drastically scaled back. I had been directly involved in this planning process since July and that in-and-of itself had been a rollercoaster. At the beginning of the year, I was more concerned with fatality management from Covid than the Inauguration though because Christmas gatherings were likely to cause more of an operational need than a hugely scaled back Inauguration. Not that we at the ME’s office were going to lower our response planning, it was just the risk was drastically less than a “normal” Inauguration.
The one little blip on my radar as 2021 was starting was this “Stop the Steal” gathering that was going to occur on January 6. This event was damaging my calm for 2 reasons. First it was the third event from these associated groups. Their first was in late November and the second in December. Each one had been relatively calm during the organized march during the day but had become more, shall we say problematic, in the evening. Each night members of the Trump supporter crowd had interacted poorly with people in and around the Black Lives Matter Plaza. Each event becoming more violent. Members of the Proud Boys had caused damage and even gone to churches and set BLM signs on fire. This, amongst other issues, has caused the leader of the Proud Boys to be banned from entering DC for the January 6th event.
In addition to just seeing the two previous events getting far more violent we received information from the intelligence fusion center with DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA). The info that was being passed to us by Donell Harvin and his team was a significant amount of talk online about the goal of many groups to disrupt the certification of the election. It was so prevalent and so specific that it was clear that these groups were intent on preventing the normal process to certify the election as the final step in the presidential election process.
Now I want to be clear on what I just wrote because there is still a lot of info out there about what occurred on January 6, 2021 that categorizes what happened differently. Not just from public social media fools but from mainstream media outlets and elected officials. Civilians on January 6th gathered in Washington D.C. with the intention of stopping the certification of the election results that, per the US Constitution, would enable the peaceful transfer of power from the current sitting president Donald Trump to the newly elected president Joe Biden. Full stop. The definition of insurrection is described as, “a violent uprising against an authority or government” or as, “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”
So that is what happened that day. The reason we know that is what happened that day is because hundreds of people live streamed and took photos and posted on social media specifically stating that is what their intention was that day.
Why was it their intention that day? It was their intention because starting as far back as the summer (and really there were signs of this in the 2016 election) Donald Trump had repeatedly made public statements that if he lost it was because the election was rigged. That it had been manipulated illegally to prevent him from maintaining power. If one was a person who believed what Donald Trump said, you would hear, pre- and post-election, that he should stay in power and that Biden had won illegally and your duly elected government was being taken from you. Therefore, it was your duty to defend your country and prevent this “false” election from being certified.
Now while I do not agree with this train of thought I describe above; enough people did to have them travel from around the country to DC on January 6th. It caused hundreds of them to use force to storm the Capitol. Dozens of them were fully kitted in tactical gear. Many of them had firearms. Bombs were even placed near the Capitol, likely as diversionary tactic to draw away law enforcement personnel. This describes not a spur of the moment event but one that was clearly coordinated.
Many in the intel community saw this coming. They shared this information. Donell Harvin has been interviewed on multiple news programs describing the steps he attempted to get this information out to those who could react to it best. He will be interviewed again on January 4th by Washington Post Live on this topic. It was his information that caused us at the ME’s office to be on a full preparedness level for a mass fatality incident. Our mobile command vehicle and mobile storage units were staged at our location less than 1 mile from the Capitol. It was partly why we had put our Disaster Morgue site on ready standby so it could be put fully operational by simply turning on a few generators. It was why I got to the ME’s office earlier than normal and activated our Fatality Management Operations Center (FMOC).
Well That Got Exciting
The ME’s office is located just south of the National Mall about the midpoint between the White House and the Capitol. There are a number of hotels around that area and as I got off the subway that morning, I immediately saw hundreds of Trump supporters in the area. I identified them as Trump supporters by the flags, shirts, hats, and complete lack of mask wearing in the midst of a pandemic. The first thing that struck me was their energy. They were all quite excited, I would even say jubilant. I shivered, not from the January cold, but from how nervous that made me.
I am not a stranger to protests. I have been on standby as an EMT for many and participated in a few myself (always leaving before the tear gas starts flying). In my experiences, protesters don’t usually act happy. They are protesting because they don’t have control over a thing that they feel strongly about, and they are doing this because it is their only redress. They aren’t generally excited to be having to do this protest.
The people I was encountering on the street as I walked to work all seemed like they were happy about what was going to occur this day. I got the sense that they felt like they were going to succeed. When I got to work, I reported in to my manager who was the head of the Investigations unit and effectively the number 3 in the organization chain of command, just below the Chief Medical Examiner and his Deputy. I told her I had a bad feeling about the crowd. She agreed with me. She had over 20 years’ experience at the DC ME’s office and her danger sense was tingling like mine. However, we could only do what we as the “last responders” could do, that is wait for death. It was not up to us to prevent it, that was the job of the first responders, Fire/EMS & LE. There was nothing additional we could do at the moment; all our resources were ready to go.
I have had plenty of experience in my 20+ years in emergency services of dealing with the quiet boredom waiting for things to get very exciting. To be clear I don’t mean in the “yay we are going to Disney Land” type of exciting but more in that adrenaline pumping, keep a calm demeanor, while the brain is going “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” type of exciting. I did all that could be done on my end. I checked in with the Deputy Medical Examiner who was essentially our Operations Section Chief and whose office was right next to the FMOC. I spoke with the head of the transport team, whose members were the ones who went out into the field and to health care facilities to retrieve the dead. She was also in charge of operations at our Disaster Morgue site. Everyone was on the same page, everyone was ready to go. So, I turned on the big screen to CNN, logged in to WebEOC (web access to the Emergency Operations Center for intel updates, resource requests, direct communications, etc.) letting them know the FMOC was active and then began to standby to standby.
First Signs of Trouble
As an EMT, particularly those of us who work in a major urban environment, you quickly learn to read people. Body language can tell you if that person in a mental health crisis is just venting and bluster or is about to charge you. It can tell you if that person who has altered mental status due to drug or alcohol use is going to be relaxed and follow your commands or decide they want to throw down. Working in EMS is not the safest profession, we don’t always have law enforcement with us so watching people or a crowd can be the best way to keep yourself safe.
This is why while Trump and others were speaking at the rally on January 6th, I was paying more attention to the crowd. What started to make me nervous was when I started seeing people leaning over to each other, whispering in the ear, and then the other person nodding and they start to move away. How a protest rally and march normally works is that everyone listens to the people speaking and then march as a group. This time people were leaving during the speeches. This struck me as odd. It was a sunny day and not particularly cold, and these did not look like people who were cold and bored and deciding to leave early.
It was shortly after that through the emergency operations center (EOC) coordination that we received reports of crowds marching early towards the Capitol. It wasn’t long after that that the larger crowd started marching towards the Capitol. The first kerfuffle’s shall we say happened very quickly (just a side note you may notice I use words to downplay the seriousness of what happened that day. This is a mental health thing in an effort to work through how absolutely terrifying that day was and how it was so close to being so much worse). This again was something that stood out to me as different from other protests I have been out at or studied as part of my emergency management courses at college. Usually, a protest starts as stable and then escalates after prolonged build up, usually when on the side of the protestors or the side of law enforcement someone reaches their breaking point and a spark is struck. This time the physical fighting started immediately.
It also escalated quite quickly. We started receiving reports of the large crowds moving and then all of sudden hearing multiple police radios transmissions about losing the line. It was also at this point we had our third fatality of the incident. The first 3 fatalities that day were not directly involved with interactions with law enforcement but as part of the crowd movement, the first 2 on the mall before the crowd started directly challenging LE on the Capitol grounds. Fortunately for us from an operational perspective all 3 had been transported by DC Fire and EMS which kept our team safe in that we did not need to respond in to the crowd to retrieve the dead.
Eat When You Can
Another EMS survival trick is when you have the time, eat, sleep, pee, get caffeine. Not necessarily in that order, that could be messy. As soon as I started to see the live feed of multiple members of this rally start physically challenging the police lines I said to my boss, “I’m going to go get lunch now cause I have a feeling this is going to be a long day.” I walked down the street, grabbed a burger, fries, coke, and chocolate chip cookies, and came back to work. In the less than 30 minutes I was gone people were already climbing the scaffolding around the Capitol building and pushing the police back up the steps.
It would be another 12 hours before I would eat again.
Not much longer after getting back and starting to eat food I had to stop, get up, walk down to my manager’s office, and say words that I never thought would leave my mouth. “They have breached the Capitol.”
That moment is seared into my brain. I can describe every detail of what I was seeing that caused me to get and walk to her office. I can tell you exactly how she was sitting at her desk and remember how her facial expression changed. What I can also remember is how unsurprised I felt. It seemed so expected that after 4 years of rhetoric from Donald Trump and the reactions of his supporters that we would end up in this exact moment. That in some ways was one of the most distressing points of the day. That I would not be shocked that I had to say those words.
Watching the crowds begin to stream into the Capitol we soon got reports of the 4th fatality of the day. We put ourselves into an even more heightened, ready to respond mode, and declared that were no longer be responding for retrieval of the dead except for time sensitive homicides or public view deaths. Essentially not responding to natural deaths out of public view or to hospitals. We also moved our mobile command vehicle and mobile storage unit into the secure loading bay of the building where the ME is located. We did not want them to be viewed as potential targets.
Again, quickly we were notified that the 4th fatality was transported by DC Fire and EMS so breathed a sigh of relief. We of course would not put at risk the living members of our team to retrieve the dead but all felt a sacred duty to make every effort to do so if it was necessary. The ME’s office is not a crime scene investigation arm of law enforcement. The ME’s office is tasked with telling the story of what we saw while safely retrieving and caring for the dead and telling their final story. It would have been my job to coordinate with law enforcement access and retrieval if the dead had remained in the Capitol building. As it was my job was to update the EOC that we had been notified of a fourth death directly related to the days unfolding events. Sadly, it would not be the last.
Not Doing Anything (And Ending up Being OK with That)
One of the biggest challenges for me when the pandemic kicked off in March of 2020 was transitioning my brain from the EMT who was trying to keep people alive to accepting that there was nothing I was going to be able to do about the hundreds of dead coming my way. It was my job to coordinate, support, and facilitate the mass fatality event so that those at the ME’s office who’s job it was to retrieve, investigate, and care for the dead could continue to do their duty.
It felt quite similar on this day. I watched the events, listened to the police radio, received updates through WebEOC, and then passed that info to the command staff within the ME’s office. I did all that sitting at a desk in the FMOC. It was quite a bizarre experience for me coming from over 10 years of being in the ambulance, at the scene’s, in the field, actively, physically doing the thing. Now I was not physically doing anything, but my brain was in overdrive. It was constant analysis, making plans, and then adjusting as things went. It was the most morbid, in the truest sense of the word, experience. I literally was thinking about ways that more people could die that day because that was my job. I was in charge of mass fatality management, and we were 1 death away from it officially being a mass fatality incident and we were one bad decision away from being a huge loss of life.
Bombs had already been found, guns had been found in a truck, and clearly one could see members in the crowd fully kitted in tactical gear. People had been using bear mace, pointing lasers, using batons, shields, and makeshift clubs. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that people in the crowd had firearms. As the 4th death was from a Capitol Police Officer it was also a safe planning assumption that a line may have been drawn in that if more insurrectionists crossed a certain red line more live ammunition would be used.
I don’t pull that out of nowhere. Testimony from officers to congress have stated clearly that such action was discussed.
I want to let that sink in for a moment. We were as close as possible, without it actually happening, to there being an exchange in gunfire between insurrectionists storming the US Capitol and Law Enforcement defending the Capitol. This is occurring on the day when elected officials were tasked with certifying the election results to go forward with the peaceful transfer of power. Nothing even close to this had occurred since George Washington transferred power to the 2nd President John Adams on March 4th 1797.
The only thing bigger that had occurred within the US since I was born in 1983 was the attacks on September 11th. From a purely personal note, I was on the complete opposite end of the country when that occurred. Now not only was I living through an event that would be described in history books, I was a 15 minute walk away from where it was occurring.
Existing Within It
One of the mental health survival tricks I had developed from the initial dark days of the pandemic was learning to exist within the tragedy unfolding around me. I sort of viewed it as if I was on the river of events and all I could do was float along with it. That is sort of my memory of how the rest of that day unfolded.
For me the next big “oh shit how is this going to go” point was going to be when enough law enforcement supported by National Guard moved back to retake the Capitol. Not that it had been completely taken over by the protestors, it is a huge building. But there was going to be a point when they were going to be challenged and pushed back. What I didn’t know was what their plan was going to be. Were they there to occupy? Were they going to dig in? Was this the point where they would defend what they had taken with firearms?
Turned out no, they just walked away fading into the night. Whether it was because Trump issued a message saying to go home (which has broader concerning implications) or because they never had a long-term plan in the first place, or because they feared actually going toe-to-toe with fully kitted and organized LE and soldiers.
The Capitol grounds were eventually fully secured. Everyone’s phones made the disturbing alert sound announcing curfew in place. Subway and busses were going to be shut down early.
I was told by my boss to go home on the subway while it was still running and log back in from there. Due to the pandemic we had been used to running things remote and I had no loss of access to intel from there. I grabbed my gear, secured the FMOC, and walked out of the building. I saw people standing outside of the hotels on the walk to the subway station, still in their Trump supporter gear. They were smoking, drinking, and laughing. I wondered how many of these people had not long ago been fighting Capitol and DC Metro Police.
That moment, walking by them in the night, will be another that will stick with me for life. They were happy, as they were in the morning. They had fulfilled the American origin fantasy of defending their homeland against tyranny. Their president had told them the election was a fraud and they had done their duty in defending their dully elected president.
Ssshhh Don’t Tell Anyone I Told You This
I got to the subway station, showed my work ID to the police with their AR’s and made my way on to one of the last subways running that night. Getting off in my neighborhood in NW DC I again showed my government ID to the armed police and made my way on the streets for the 15 minute walk home.
This was yet again another one of the disturbing moments of the day. Even during the worst parts of the pandemic people were still on the streets going to and from work as essential workers or going to the grocery store. There were no people. There were no cars. Even IHOP was closed.
I got home, poured myself a gin and tonic, and started blasting the Taylor Swift album Lover. Because what the hell else are you supposed to do after spending 12 hours in a fatality management operations center watching an insurrection unfold and waiting for death?
My day wasn’t even over at that point. I had a scheduled midnight joint operations call coordinated by HSEMA EOC to be on and had just been updated about the 5th death of the day. It was now officially a mass fatality incident. I had reports to write and intel to prepare. See at this point, congress had not still reconvened to certify the election. I sure as hell would not be going to sleep until, at least in theory, the next step in the peaceful transfer of power had been accomplished.
The main standout from the midnight call was when a representative from DC Metro police emergency management team said, (and I am paraphrasing here) I will go ahead and update for Capitol Police as they are still a bit busy over there.
We finished the meeting, next one scheduled for 0800 later that day at this point. I watched on CNN the final certification and then fell into a deep sleep.
Not Done Yet
This of course was not the end of it. We were pretty much on high alert in DC until past the inauguration. I can now say I lived in a city with armed soldiers at check points in Humvees on the street. I smiled and nodded to the squad outside our ME’s building. I was on duty for over 48hrs from January 19th to January 21’st except for a couple 4 hour breaks to sleep at a hotel down the street filled with National Guard soldiers. My 38th birthday on January 20th was definitively the worst one of my life and I pray to the gods I have none worse.
Now here we are almost a year later. The congressional investigation committee is struggling with people refusing to pass on information or testify. Only 2 republicans have agreed to be on it and they have been ostracized because of it. There are still those in power and in the public eye that refuse to acknowledge it even was an insurrection. There is a strong likelihood that the republicans will retake the House in the November 2022 election making it so that if any information and analysis will be released to the public or elected officials be held accountable it needs to happen before then.
We are no closer today in an open discussion about why what happened on January 6th happened, let alone being better prepared to make sure it does not happen again.
Sociology and Emergency Management: New BFF’s?
I mentioned that when I told my manager that they had breached the Capitol I felt like it was the culmination of the Trump presidency. It was what I and many others had feared from the get-go.
Trump shares characteristics as a leader with others in history. A certain charisma, an ability at rousing speeches, an ability to inspire blind loyalty. This has been occurred in many other authoritarian, nationalistic, leaders through history. This doesn’t tend to go well for the countries in which they rise.
Those of you who work in emergency management and emergency services know that our job is much more than the response to the emergency. It is more heavily centered (if we are doing it right) in the research and intelligence analysis phase that leads to mitigation and preparation efforts. The better job we do at that the easier and better we are at the response efforts.
If we do the same regarding what happened on January 6th, 2021, to ensure that it doesn’t happen again we have to brush up on our sociology skill set.
My first true introduction to sociology was in some of the classes that were part of my bachelor’s degree when I was studying the UK. I was immediately struck by how much of it is relevant to emergency services and management. I still have on my bookshelf the Dictionary of Sociology. From that I can share with you the definition of sociology. It being:
Sociology: The term has two stems – the Latin socius (companion) and the Greek logos (study of) – and literally means the study of the processes of companionship. In these terms, sociology may be defined as the study of the bases of social membership. More technically, sociology is the analysis of the structure of social relationships as constituted by social interaction, but no definition is entirely satisfactory because of the diversity of perspectives which is characteristic of the modern discipline.
I interpret this as why people in a society aka community do what they do in particular to and with each other. I will use an example from personal experience. In September 2015 I was on a placement with the Scottish Government Resilience Development Service, essentially their department of emergency management. At the time they were leading pandemic flu planning exercises. As part of that I spent a couple days in a huge hotel conference room with members from everyone that would be part of such a response, from public health to ambulance service to mortuary affairs to hospital systems. Long story short the planning revolved around keeping things together until a vaccine could be developed and then get the vaccine out to the public and job done, sorted, tea and medals for everyone.
Just how well is that working now, not just in America, but in many European countries as well? Why is there vaccine hesitancy? Time for us to turn to sociology to get that figured out.
In the interest of brevity in an already not so brief essay I am not going to go into a deep dive of the sociology of what led to January 6th occurring. There are some key points that I want to make however to spur the conversation onwards.
First off let us ask ourselves if we think the people who participated in the insurrection fell like their grievances have been resolved a year later? That answer is clearly and resoundingly NO. In late September of this year I went on a cross country road trip and in every one of the 22 states I passed through I saw variations of signs along the road that Trump won, Biden is not their president, Pence is a traitor, and others along the same vein. At Trump rally’s he still says the election was stolen, people speak on Fox News saying Biden is not the dully elected president. All these people believe Trump should and will again be the president. Even Steven Bannon recently said, “when Trump gets back into office in 2024 or earlier.”
Additionally, after the events, social media was filled with people saying if they had been there they would have kept the certification from going forward. Many believe they should have occupied the Capitol for longer. Many even believe they should have gone full armed rebellion. Many who own guns believe that they own guns to defend against a tyrannical government. It is one of the reasons gun ownership went up when Obama was elected president, people felt he was going to take their guns away in the first step towards a socialist communist government. Those people feel the democratic party is even more leaning that way (just look at many of the campaign videos put out in the last national election).
Trump used these fears in his rhetoric. Saying on the morning of January 6th if you aren’t willing to fight for your country it will be taken away and destroyed. If you believed him wouldn’t you be willing to do the same thing this country was founded up to fight for it?
Now seeing that they failed on January 6th in preventing from Biden to getting into office wouldn’t it be reasonable to believe that they would be willing to do it again?
Take this a step further and fast forward to 2024. With current intel Trump will run again. The democratic nominee will be a moot point because regardless of who it is it will not change the minds of the majority of republicans. Trump had solidly changed the republican party with his cult of personality. They will follow him where he leads. So if he wins, well no fear of another insurrection there.
Believe what you will about the far left, ANTIFA, BLM, whoever. They are too busy infighting to organize an insurrection. However good emergency planning means never saying never. So flip the script. Trump wins again. People on the far left fear that with him in office again things will be even worse. This could lead to people on the left saying the ongoing restrictions and rolling back of voting rights we are seeing currently in republican led state legislatures are violating their constitutional rights and there for they are validated.
Washington Post just released a poll that shows the following:
If however Trump runs and does not win again, we are right back in the danger zone, and not the fun one that gets sung about in Top Gun.
This Has Happened Before and Can Happen Here
The final point I want to make before I wrap this up comes from a historical perspective. No major event in history came out of nowhere, spontaneously, without a buildup. The American Revolution, Civil War, World War 1, World War 2 all had years if not decades of traveling down a path were one event led to another which built into the major event itself, which lasted over multiple years. In a more modern event Osama Bid Laden got his start fighting as part of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the USSR and got his start being pissed at America after feeling betrayed by the CIA.
Link that thought process with the fact that authoritarian rulers are commonly elected into power: Putin, Hitler, Mussolini, and 2 of those 3 were in jail after their initial failed attempts.
Lastly Democracies only work when people make reasonable decisions for the greater good based upon critical decision making based upon facts presented by subject matter experts.
Does anyone see any of that happening now?
So What the Hell are we Supposed to do About it?
I feel like this is sort of like climate change. The damage has been done, we can’t stop what has already occurred, all we can do is mitigate the coming storm damage.
We in emergency services cannot stop the polarizing violent rhetoric that occurs on social media. We cannot stop politicians from fanning the flames and making things worse by not playing nicely with each other. We cannot stop people in the public sphere acting like damn fools.
What we can do is support the national intel fusion centers in gathering information. Now I am a firm believer in free speech, privacy, am anti-government surveillance for purely gathering information. But we know who the groups are who support and are proponents of violent insurrection. We underestimate them if we think that they are a bunch of yahoos just blowing off steam and would never actually do anything, because now they have. I believe it is a hard line to walk, gathering information without infringing on basic human rights, doing it in a way that allows emergency services to take steps to prevent another January 6th from occurring. I believe ethical surveillance can occur. Through ethical surveillance we can disrupt what occurred on January 6th from occurring again. In fact, it did happen to some extent last year, it probably kept that day from being even worse than it already turned out.
There are multiple examples of this going well. First was the weekend after January 6th there was online chatter about doing the same thing at state capitol buildings around the country. All 50 states responded with activation of national guard units, heavy police presence, and barricades being set up. Again in September of this year there was talk about a protest occurring in DC to rally around those arrested over the insurrection. Again DC went into full alert mode and almost know one showed up.
We will be self-defeating if we turn into a police surveillance state to prevent insurrections from occurring. It is up to those who work in that realm to be the guardians against insurrection while still holding true that which makes a democracy function.
I have a hard time thinking about a more difficult task, utilize law enforcement intelligence gathering techniques to defend democratic freedoms without trampling on democratic freedoms. As Nietzsche says, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
We need to first acknowledge that January 6th was a direct attack on the democracy of this country. Next, we need to come to terms that America is not infallible or undefeatable. Greater empires than our have come and gone. We in emergency services and management fail when we allow our thinking to be that can’t or won’t happen. A former professor of mine, Andrew Thompson at the University of South Wales, said something that has stuck with me all these years later. He said that people in society generally believe and act that the way things are currently are the way things always have been and the way things always will be. How many of us have worked or still work in agencies that say, well we have always done things that way. We can’t do that with our American form of government. In that I mean we cannot believe it has existed always and will always exist. We actually have to do something to keep it going.
Final quote of the day for you will be from that curmudgeon Winston Churchill. As he said, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” I by no means believe America is best of the best, I have read too much history, traveled too much, and spoken to too many people to believe that we are infallible. That, however, doesn’t mean that I want to see it all get burned down. On a purely selfish note, that never tends to go well for the average person.
The old ambulance driver in me would rather take steps to save the patient than say well they lived a hard life we are just going to let them die. So let’s all take steps, in whatever roles we have in our various agencies to make sure we can go the rest of our careers saying January 6th was the worst shift we ever had.
Go carefully my friends.