It’s time.

It’s been a year since the former president tried to stage a coup and he’s still tweeting and screeching from his lair in Florida. His cronies are still roaming free and our Democracy is still in serious danger.

Between the pandemic and the political uncertainty, all of which are made worse every day these people remain at large, anxiety levels are creeping higher every day — at least mine are.

Toss in a flood in my basement last August, the damage from which is still being fixed five months later because of “supply chain” issues (I suspect these are deliberate so prices can be raised), and all I want to do is knit and bake bread. It’s hard to concentrate long enough to read the news in the morning and I can’t watch it on TV.

Like others, I lay awake nights wondering whether humanity will even survive. God knows we don’t deserve to. We’re following “leaders” who beckon us down the path to destruction, burning the forests, over-fishing and polluting the oceans, resisting switching to renewable sources of energy and blithely unaware that the methane we’re allowing to escape into the atmosphere will keep increasing until we no longer can breathe. When I mentioned this to a friend a couple years ago, his response was, “Human are clever.” I had to remind him we’re not clever enough to be able to breathe methane.

We’re living in a failed state. Not failing, failed.

We can’t pass laws that will save the planet, let alone ease the suffering of the nearly half of Americans living in or very near poverty. We can’t raise wages, we can’t offer health care, we can’t even assure people their votes will be counted on Election Day. We can’t stop mass shootings. We can’t manage immigration. We can’t maintain our infrastructure well enough to prevent the shutdown of the busiest highway on the East Coast in a snowstorm, leaving thousands of people stranded in their cars for more than a day. We can’t even work together to stop a deadly pandemic.

All of this because we won’t tax the richest of the rich, but we still spend trillions on the war economy. We still force poor people to go to war in exchange for an education, and too many either don’t come home or come home so compromised that an education is difficult, at best, and we address the issue of veteran suicides with a “Thanks for your service.”

In addition to suicides, rates of addiction and overdose deaths have skyrocketed because people have no hope of their lives getting any better and the Sackler family took advantage of people’s pain so they could increase profits by fueling the addiction epidemic. They’re still free, too, by the way.

The stock market keeps rising, though, so we’re told the economy is blazing hot, and it is — for the privileged. Most people don’t have money to invest in the stock market, and that wealth isn’t trickling down. A decade after workers began asking for $15 an hour, some states and municipalities are offering it, but the minimum wage would be almost $24 an hour now if it had kept pace with inflation, and frankly, it takes that to live comfortable anywhere in the country.

Housing prices continue to surge, leaving nothing for the people who work for a living, especially those in the service jobs we claim are so essential. Homelessness is rising with the prices as investors and corporations buy up more and more of the housing stock. There are more than enough empty housing units to house every homeless person, but we make them sleep in the streets and then arrest them for vagrancy and demolish the small tent communities they build.

We place people in poverty with bad public policies and then vilify them for being poor.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrection still walk free a year after their coup attempt because we appear to not have a functioning justice system. We have a Supreme Court packed with right-wing idealogues to speed us along the path to totalitarianism. Already, women are losing control of our bodies and voting rights are being stripped away.

I have been quiet lately, as I try to process all of this. It’s time to start speaking up again.

We have arrived at the last minute. We are tettering on the edge of ecological and economic collapse unlike anything we’ve seen in human history. I’m thinking the end of the Bronze Age was just a practice run for what’s on the horizon already.

It’s time. If we don’t move now, it really will be too late.

Wake up. They are not defeated.

Capitol Police were ready for the insurrectionists this time.

Saturday’s rally in support of the January 6 insurrectionists appeared to be a bust. Hardly anyone showed up and the press far outnumbered participants.

This apparent failure sent the left into spasms of laughter and derision.

Do not be fooled. This was not the failure so many of us think it was.

Organizers realized late in the week that the Capitol was prepared for them this time and advised people to stay home. They claimed the rally was a government trap to identify people who still support the efforts of the former president to regain the White House. Thousands of people obeyed and stayed away

We don’t know their true numbers, and we honestly don’t know what they’re up to. Look at your social media feed and you won’t see their plans because they don’t do it all on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Besides, you likely have blocked most of them to avoid having them troll you, or to resist the temptation to troll them.

While hiding them makes our lives easier, it also makes it more difficult to keep track of their lies and their plans, and that’s dangerous.

All day yesterday, I saw posts about how the planned rally was an utter failure. It was not. It was a practice run for the next one, which we’ll all think will be another bust, and for which we might not be as prepared. That’s what they’re waiting for.

These people are bullies, and bullies back down when people stand up to them. They don’t necessarily stay down, though. These people are waiting for us to look away.

When more than one-third of Republicans still believe the former president will be reinstated , and half of Republicans still think Biden lost the election, we have a much bigger problem than the attendance at Saturday’s rally would suggest.

Before you celebrate the demise of Trumpism, look at the polls and what these Republicans still believe. You can’t argue facts with them because they operate with their own set of “facts,” provided by the hard-right. They do their research on Fox (or Newsmax or whatever right-wing source they prefer)-approved web sites. They don’t believe mainstram news sources because their right-wing conspiracy sources tell them these news organizatons are “socialist.”

The former president and his people are quietly replacing election officials with people who will help them overturn the next election. They have worked for years to make us believe elections in this country are corrupt as they also have worked to corrupt the system.

The joke of a recount in Arizona was actually not a joke. When they normalize such outrageous behavior, they bring us one step closer to fascism and dictatorship. The first thing fascists and other dictators do is foster doubt in the validity of elections, and in this country, a third of voters have bought into their narrative.

We are not out of danger. These QAnon folks are a real and present threat to our nation. If we are to survive as a Democratic Republic, we need to wake up and pay attention.

Accountability needs to come before unity

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks about having to hide in a bathroom to escape terrorists who we calling for her to be killed on Jan. 6.

Reporting by the New York Times yesterday and AXIOS today makes it pretty clear that the former president was deeply involved in the conspiracy that led to the attempted violent coup of Jan. 6.

Investigations are starting to uncover involvement by Republican members of Congress, some of whom led reconnaissance tours the day before the attack, and some of whom tweeted the whereabouts of Democrats the terrorists were looking for during the attack.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chilling Instagram video describes what happened to her during those terrifying hours hunkered down in the bathroom of Rep. Katherine Porter, believing she was going to die at the hands of the terrorists she could hear calling for her.

“Where is she? Where is she?” she heard them ask from just a few feet away. She was wearing heels and Rep. Porter helped her find a pair of sneakers she could wear in case she had to run for her life.

At least two members of Congress have tested positive for COVID since the assault because Republicans refused to wear masks, and then a majority of Republicans in the House and a handful in the Senate voted to overturn a fair and legitimate election.

Someone needs to pay for these crimes before we can talk about holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.”

We have reached levels of stupidity and corruption I wouldn’t have thought possible before Election Day 2016, and I was aware it was going to be really bad.

But 2016 wasn’t when all this began. Evangelical “Christians” have been wanting to “take over” since I was a child growing up among them in the 1950s and ’60s. And their alliance with white supremacists and fascists proves their hypocritical belief that it’s OK to do anything — steal, lie, cheat, even kill — as long as it’s for Jesus.

They voted for Reagan because he was against abortion. It didn’t matter that he was incompetent, that he and his cronies would set us on a path that was pro-military, pro-police and pro-Wall Street, anti-labor, anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman, anti-health care and anti-environment.

They voted for Bush I because he kissed up to them.

They voted for Bush II because he was a “Christian,” and they supported his illegal kidnappings, imprisonments and torture, his illegal wars and corrupt cronies.

Then they voted for the least moral, least competent, pettiest, nastiest, most ignorant and unstable man ever to run for the office, and they supported an attempted coup to keep him in office after he was defeated at the polls..

Now they want “unity.”

Well, here’s what’s required for unity:

To start, convict this former president in the Senate and ban him from holding any federal office ever again.

Then file criminal charges against him and all his co-conspirators — and that includes every last person we can find who entered the Capitol illegally on Jan. 6.

I have been arrested twice in that building. Once was for disrupting the Senate by bringing in an unframed 5×7 photo of my late son to hold up when they began debate on repealing the Affordable Care Act, as we chanted “Kill the bill!” I was convicted and did 48 hours of community service. The other time was when I tried to speak to leaders of the Senate about health care. I paid a $50 fine.

I didn’t break in. I actually went through security. I didn’t steal anything, break anything, cause any damage, smear my own excrement on the walls, threaten anyone, carry anything that could be construed as a weapon, mouth off to cops, threaten anyone, attack anyone — none of that. I chanted from the Senate Gallery and I prayed and sang in the Rotunda after being refused entry to the corridor that led to Mitch McConnell’s office, where I had hoped to deliver a letter.

I went there to try and save lives, not to take them. And I was arrested, tried and punished for trying to beg for people to have access to health care.

I broke the law by refusing to leave the Rotunda, and by chanting from the Senate Gallery. I was arrested and punished. I never complained about being arrested. I knew it was likely when I went in there, and I never, not even for a moment, considered violence.

I want to see justice dished out to everyone involved in this mess before I cozy up to anyone who supported this creature, and I refuse to cozy up to (or work with) anyone who still supports him and his lies.

Donald Trump is a common criminal. A thug. He belongs in prison for the rest of his life, as do his children, his advisors, his lieutenants and members of Congress who helped to plan or incite the insurrection.

When I see that, we can talk about unity.

Accountability first, then unity.

No justice, no peace.