Donald,

Racking up two impeachments is obviously not something most of us would want on our resumes and so I suppose you aren’t in a very good mood tonight. So sad.

But you know who probably is in a very, very good mood today? Your old buddy Vladimir – I bet he’s tickled pink by the events of the last week. I also bet he’s on the edge of his seat waiting to see what comes next since he can almost certainly count on you to come through for him with more anti-democratic, over-the-top evil crap heading into President-elect Biden’s Inauguration next week.

This is probably an out-there thought, but were you actually angling for a second impeachment? You do have a “let’s go large” attitude about everything so why not go large and make sure you’ve got a special place in the history books, even if it’s a special place of ignominy? I mean, there wasn’t anything remotely subtle about what you did. Maybe you were so deluded that you thought a self-coup could work and so why not give it a try? But you had to know that even if you knee-capped the police and military response, there was no way the insurrection was going to result in four more years for you. There’s just not an alternate reality of any sort that was going to get you that outcome. Thus, the incredibly blatant nature of what you did and its inevitable failure at least suggests that you wanted a big consequence, like another impeachment, whether for the history books or because someone, somewhere has promised you something you value a great deal to throw the country under the bus and take your lumps.

Who the hell knows what your true motives were/are? I sure I don’t.

But I do know that there are still lovely things happening even in the midst of all this wrenching, painful ugliness our country is enduring.

This morning Laura showed me a most wonderful picture from the Twitter-verse that made my heart sing and my eyes well up. Someone took a picture of someone else taking a picture (though that picture taker is outside the frame) of four Black National Guardsmen, all dutifully masked, standing in a loose half circle in front of the statue of Rosa Parks in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. It’s clear from how their eyes are crinkled up that they’re smiling and they look so happy to be there with her likeness and with one another.

Even in the midst of all the ugliness of why they’re currently stationed there at the Capitol and why they have to wear surgical masks, it’s a beautiful marker of hard fought progress and an important reminder that we need to honor those who went before by doing our level best to keep up our parts of this whole bargain. I know you won’t understand about honor or acting with integrity to safeguard everyone’s rights and dignity – that’s not part of your make up. Thankfully, however, it does come naturally to many of us and right now it’s triply important that we lift those people up and celebrate them because we need all the inspiration we can get.

May we be safe from malign leadership.
May we be willing to hew to the high road.
May we celebrate the real strengths of integrity and honor.
May we accept that as bleak as things are right now, there are still some sunbeams to be seen.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson