FROM THE LEFT- The Daily Commercial: Time to break our silence on attack against America

Mary Sharpe  Guest Columnist

A few days after the 2020 election, having liberated several campaign stickers from my car bumper, I went to the local car wash to clean it up. I walked inside to pay, and an older man walked in behind me. He struck up a conversation immediately with a guy behind the counter about the election, to which the man behind the counter replied, “Oh, it’s not over!” 

The customer said, “Well, who’s gonna do something about it? Trump?” 

The man replied, “Well, we are not gonna stand for this. We have a plan. We are gonna do something big.”

Upon hearing this, I headed for the door. Once outside I remember thinking to myself, “Did I just hear someone threatening to overthrow my government?” It upset me so much that I began shaking. Were they just angrily spouting off, or was it a serious threat? And what should I do? It bothered me for the rest of my day and into the following week. I saved the receipt to remember the date and time, feeling it was that important.

I relayed it to several friends, but never reported it to authorities. Surely this was just idle threats, angrily voiced by a tireless Trump supporter who was unable to deal with the reality of a loss.

A few weeks later I watched those angry words become angry actions as the seeds of rage spoken at that car wash bore fruit and played out on my TV screen. As I watched in shocked sadness, the words from the car wash kept ringing in my ears.

Why had I not done something? I began to take personal blame for the events taking place at the Capitol. And then I began to rationalize my inaction. Is silence a crime? How many other Americans across the country had overheard similar conversations and thought it only angry chatter? Are they feeling the same way today, pangs of guilt for not speaking up?

We are all growing weary as this painfully slow investigation wears on, but more details are emerging every day. Some are just infuriating and some provide me with cold comfort, realizing that nothing that I could have done would have changed the fate of the Capitol on that tragic day. It turns out the FBI, CIA, and local and state police received thousands of red-flag messages about the impending siege and chose to ignore them. Even the chain of command at the Pentagon had been compromised.

Details about a meeting at the Willard Hotel a block from the White House the night before the siege support the fact that it was, indeed, a coordinated coup to overthrow our country. It was not spontaneous, but planned. The Washington Post recently documented 187 minutes of inaction by President Trump during the siege; Trump’s part in this is no longer in question.

Other countries actually went on alert worldwide because they suspected that the U.S. government was collapsing before their eyes.

Trump is suing to hide documents that would tell us his role in the insurrection. Republicans know what happened, but in a wholesale abandonment of their patriotism, they really don’t want to talk about it. They were never as honorable as they pretended to be.

Major players with complicit exposure are undermining the investigation, believing that if they can stall until the midterms and suppress any facts from coming out, they can win back control of the House and Senate and kill the investigation. We cannot allow this to go unpunished. It is time for Republicans to pay for their sins.

Prosecuting a former president has never happened in the history of our country, but neither has an overthrow of our government orchestrated by a sitting president. Never in our history has a president who took an oath to defend our Constitution so blatantly abused it. We cannot and must not forget Trump’s betrayal of our nation.

It has been 10 months since we witnessed the siege. We have seen enough. We need Congress to prosecute these crimes against our country. Congress will act when the American people stand up and demand it. We all owe it to our country to finally break our silence. And the world is still watching.