By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com
I continue to watch the news and continue to be saddened damn near to tears over the images I am watching.
They are the sight and sounds of rioters storming into offices inside the Capitol Building of the United States of America.
I am 71 years old. I have lived through a presidential assassination, have served my country in a war zone, have watched another president commit high crimes and then resign from office in the midst of what we all thought at the time was the “worst constitutional crisis” in U.S. history.
None of those prior events posed quite the threat to the very fabric of our national government than what we all witnessed in real time this week.
Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, incited the rioters to do the damage they did.
It is fair to ask: What if they had taken prisoners during their riot? What if they had managed to surround, say, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Senate leaders, or even the vice president, Mike Pence? What if they had taken them captive in their madness?
They didn’t. They did considerable damage to our public property. They broke windows. They ransacked offices. Five people — including a D.C. police officer — died in the melee.
They also have inflicted potentially grievous damage on our democratic form of government.
They were fueled by the lie that Donald Trump kept telling them, that the election that Trump lost was “stolen” by Democrats who engineered a theft that propelled Joe Biden into the presidency.
It was a despicable, reprehensible display of sedition. They sought to overturn the results of a free and fair election. They and their champion, Donald Trump, demonstrated for the entire world to see just how perilous is the state of our precious form of government.
In all my years, it was one of those events I never thought I would witness. It frightens me beyond what is reasonable. The government I took an oath to defend and protect while the country was at war for a time was in danger of falling to this madness.
Donald Trump’s inaugural speech featured a single memorable line, when he declared that the “American carnage would stop right here and now.” This individual’s term as president is ending with the kind of carnage most Americans never thought would be possible in this proud land of ours.