I was supposed to be writing a piece on Biden’s economic plan and my disagreements with it, but yesterday’s events in Washington D.C. rapidly turned my thoughts. America is now put on life support.

What we saw on TV was a turning point in American democracy. Make no mistake– this is what we typically see in third world countries — the complete distrust of a government, and what maniacs do when they don’t get their way.

The complete disregard for anyone in uniform in order to preserve our freedoms. Everyone who has fought for safety, law, and order in any way saw their work destroyed on live TV by a mob of zealots who couldn’t realize that their choice for president tried to destroy the entire election process.

Earlier this year, I did an article on how Republicans can rebound after Trump lost — every point in that article is now secondary and possibly useless. The party lost all credibility through association with the people who broke into and looted the U.S Capitol.

President Trump lost anything going for him when the President-Elect went on national TV before he did. And when Trump did eventually speak out, it was a message over Twitter that contained more bickering about the election than it did telling the thugs that their actions needed to stop. 

If the election was fraudulent, wouldn’t the best solution be to enact legislation to prevent it from happening again? That would be logical, and that legislation enacted would be able to find out the legitimacy of the election in question as well as future ones. Of course, that isn’t happening and has instead become a massive PR disaster for the Trump campaign, their cause, and on a broader scope, the country itself.

Social media was also up in arms about the supposed white privilege that occurred between the BLM protests over the summer and this. To those who would advance that argument, I say stop race-baiting. BLM protestors were allowed to loot and riot rather freely after the number of protests got too large. Cities were literally on fire during the summer. 

Rioting does not work. Don’t think one riot or the other is wrong. They both are. 

Switch the quotes of Republicans and Democrats during the riots over the summer to now. They are saying the exact same thing but in reverse. It’s sickening. The scary part is that the majority of the country is too programmed against each other to see it.

The BLM riots and the siege of the Capitol are very different events — I’m not that ignorant to that. However, both movements are learning that their gripes became less accepted because of violence.

We are so interested in blindly hating the other side because we were told to do so by the media. This is the result. This cycle of hating the other side during an election got so out of control that people stormed the US Capitol over it. 

We are in the middle of a history book chapter on the collapse of the American system of government that was started in 1789. America’s worst three presidents have been back to back to back. Bush, Obama, and Trump took this country from greatness to the verge of collapse in 20 years. America’s debt was 5.6 trillion dollars in 2000. We are now approaching 28 trillion dollars just 20 years later. Don’t get me started on anything else right now, but hopefully, the point is taken. 

Yesterday’s events did not just suddenly happen. The scenes that unfolded followed years of frustration, distrust in government, and alienated citizens that ultimately lost their minds.

The riots over the summer were the same thing. Both riots have hurt America’s image and its ability to unite. We should be united against racism, police brutality, and fraudulent elections. 

Yet, here we are, divided as ever with every issue at hand. COVID-19 became political. How do we let that happen? We’ve argued over deaths– human lives–as statistics about which party had the better plan. We argued over how many people lost their livelihood as a result of the shutdown. We used human beings as pawns in a nasty political game over who’s less evil. It is flat-out disgusting. 

Democrats told me to be scared of Trump in office, and they now tell me to have hope now that they have Biden in power. Republicans told me the exact opposite. Democrats told me to hate police’s riot gear because it showed the flaws of the police state. Now they cheer the use of this gear to move protestors out of the Capitol and ask them to get Trump while they’re at it. Once again, Republicans said the exact opposite.  

But will anything change? Or will we just continue to down this hole we are digging ourselves into?

Judging by how this is going, the most likely outcome rests in the latter. Once again, people are more interested in blaming the other side for different events than realizing we are spiraling out of control. 

The future of America is now on life support. It’s a scary idea, but we must view this event as a turning point. The last five years have been a disastrous ordeal that has bent this country to the point of breaking. We must acknowledge why these events have occurred, instead of just being shocked by them. Otherwise, the division continues to widen.

Despite all of this, we have the greatest government ever created. The Constitution did its job in preventing a coup from a crazed group of people. All of the questions of its being outdated have evaporated since yesterday. There is hope considering how sturdy our government is. We simply need to have the right leaders moving forward. Although I have my gripes with Biden, he will be a stable force after four years of chaos. 

Over the next couple of elections, a new generation of legislators will hopefully take office, allowing us to move forward after a time when we’ve only gone backward. 

In times of despair, optimism for a better tomorrow is required. Even on life support, looking for the positives is what will lead us there.