What Happens Next?

Many years ago a woman named Deborah Layton spoke to our book group about her book "Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's 
story of Life and Death in the People's Temple"  Although she was fortunate enough to escape the mass suicide ordered by Jim Jones, a charismatic but increasingly paranoid and unstable personality she said, "I put everything in denial and locked it down." It took her many years to realize that given isolation, a strong controlling personality  and a constant diet of being told how to think, "anything can be a cult'".

Yesterdays' events in Washington were horrendous, but not surprising. We should have seen it coming, but we were in denial about the extremes to which Trump would go. We didn't realize the depth of the cult he had created around himself with a steady and unrelenting diet of lies. Some of us knew they were lies but didn't know what to do about it; some knew they were lies but intentionally ignored them and some were taken in by the cult. Yes some are White Supremacists and right wing extremists, but many,  like your neighbor or relative who suddenly and inexplicably started wearing a MAGA hat, are regular people who fell prey to  Fox news, facebook and twitter. We should have realized how long Trump had been cultivating his followers with a constant and unrelenting diet of lies. He has created a cult and and like all cult leaders he has fallen prey to his own delusional power. 

I think our Democracy is suffering.WE believed in American exceptionalism when we should have realized that the damage runs deep.I hope Pence and the cabinet invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump from office, but I don't think that will be the end of it.  

I do think there is also hope. the Congress came back together in the very chamber where they had crouched under their chairs earlier in the day to finish the work they had started in the morning...ratify the electoral college vote and declare BIden president. Enough people, empowered by Black Lives Matter  came forward to elect Biden president and, just yesterday, epowered by Black Voters Matter, to elect  a Black preacher and a Jewish man in Georgia to the Democrats control of the Senate. It is up to all of us to support them and our democratic ideals in trying to heal our country both literally and figuratively. We need to listen to each other and shun the cult.