[System Processing]
I am trying to wrap my head around it...
I am very close friends with a conservative man, a Baby Boomer who was a forest ranger and a cop before he worked construction. He was born and raised in the South.
(That’s not the thing I am trying to wrap my head around.)
We don’t talk about politics, generally. He makes a lot of jokes at my expense about crazy liberals, and I have always taken it with good humor, and waited until I got home to roll my eyes and sigh. But we almost never discuss things like presidencies, or elections, or big political news cycles.
What is there to discuss, really? He is firmly in his camp, I am firmly in mine. I won’t convince him that Fox News is brainwashing him. He won’t convince me that NPR is brainwashing me.
So we don’t go there.
But a couple of months ago, a conversation on my back deck took a startling turn. I don’t even remember what we were talking about, but I think I said something about Trump pardoning a lot of criminals (Why did I say this to a man I never talk politics with? I think I assumed his law enforcement background would influence how he felt about criminals being pardoned. Maybe I hoped we agreed on one thing? Who knows.) and somehow the Jan 6th insurrection came up.
He said he wasn’t sure it was as bad as the media made it out to be. “I don’t know, I just don’t have all the facts, so it’s hard to really say what actually happened.”
(Note: Now that 40000 hours of footage was released of that day, he could watch it all and find out most of the facts, I suppose.)
I was shocked. Genuinely. It stayed on my mind. I rolled that over in my memory several times as the weeks passed. “Is that what he really said?” “Am I remembering this wrong?”
Spoiler alert: I was not remembering it wrong.
We had a facebook chat about it today when I sent him an article about the woman who rejected Trump’s pardon her her part in Jan 6th. She had been convicted of a misdemeanor, served time in jail (she was sentenced to 2 months), and had come to decide she had been in the wrong. That they had all been in the wrong.
He’s not buying it. “[She was probably] paid a lot of money or was a trump hating liberal all along.]
And this is what I can’t wrap my head around.
Video footage shows much of the worst of the criminal activity that day. People were charged, given due process, had lawyers, went to court, prosecutors presented evidence, judges (and some juries) heard testimony, and people were convicted.
That isn’t enough evidence to convince him Jan 6th was very bad.
But he can immediately think it’s a conspiracy that an elderly woman decided to take responsibility for her part.
Make it make sense.
I’ll just be over here baffled until the end of time.