Cold, grey day in hell

5 years on

About 30,000 people gathered in Washington DC on a cloud-endarkened winter Wednesday in January. I rode my bicycle to the Mall as I often do when grievance mongers generate demonstrations, protests or other gatherings of interest. This particular protest, invoked by the president, stood out to me not because he called it but because many of the web-based researchers I tracked were adamant that the event would culminate in a crowd big enough to mount an attempt to overthrow the recent election. That little substantive defense was put in place to prevent it, remains one of my own grievances.

The crowd south of the then-extant White House spread across the lawns of the Ellipse and the Mall south to the Washington Monument. This was in some sense a typical DC protest bunch: the mass generally upset about one overall thing, but with leaders (some I recognized) of factions spouting their standard gripes via signs and bullhorns (commies bad, political parties bad, atheists bad, other religious sects bad, feminism bad, Congress bad, Supreme Court bad) so within the bunch there were affinity clusters. Many men and boys were motley-dressed as if cosplaying wannabe-rioters, with lots of camo and flannel, heavily padded, with helmets, clubs of various sorts…I saw two guys with guns.

The event was already under way, speeches interspersed with canned pop music from a prior century. I decided not to try squeezing close to the fenced-off portion of the crowd (bicycles are a nuisance in those situations) and stayed further up the hill toward the Monument . Here it was easy to ride between clusters of people without antagonizing anyone, yet still get a sense of their attitudes. The animosity quotient was high.

It was pointless trying to hear the speeches mostly because the sound system was not good enough to project voices well enough to be understood at distance. So after an hour or more of soaking up the scene at that site I rode the mile and a half east to the Capitol, where I saw many cops and barricades. Then I went round to the Supreme Court, in case there were protesters there, but in fact no one was around that building front or back. On my way back toward the Mall I stopped at the plaza east of the Capitol where there was a huddle of camo-clad guys, standing well away from the two (just two!) cops on that side of the building. The guys in the huddle seemed annoyed at me riding a circle around them. The scene reminded me of the Oregon Rep. Mike Nearman’s stunt opening the side door of the statehouse for violent protesters the previous month.

When I then swung toward Pennsylvania Av I came upon a busload of out-of-town folk clearly on tour of exotic, godless DC, led by a fast-talking preacher-type who was slandering me and my fellow DC residents in various ways. I had come across this guy in previous demos, and the message was pretty much the same. The group was genuinely wide-eyed looking at me.

I headed west on Constitution to meet the crowd by now moving toward Capitol. They were packed tight enough that it was unwise to try to get thru, so I turned south onto the Mall and saw another crowd now moving east toward the Capitol. By this time it was clear the eastbound crowds were much reduced from the main mass of people who had gathered by the Ellipse. The front of this bunch was also more animated, and hate-driven, based on their words and actions. It was clear that the Capitol cops were in for it.

This moment was when I realized my phone battery was dead, so there was no way to photograph anything or call anyone who might have access to more defense. The cops on the barricades were entirely too few to have any chance of stopping the mob from going into the building. I noticed a guy climb the Grant statue west of the Pool and look not east, but back to the west, as if assessing the size and potential of the crowd. This looked to me like classic hooligan behavior, trying to determine if/when sufficient numbers and density of rioters will be on scene, to make it go off.

The mob got louder and more animated as it approached the cops. The mood darkened still more. I felt the urge to wade in to get in people’s faces even if it was futile. It was the only time I’ve been close enough to genuinely punch nazis, but it was also the first time I would have been outnumbered by at least 3000 to 1. So I stood watch to witness. Then I had a moment of clarity – I knew the vote count would be televised, so I decided I should ride home and try to get hold of any security agency that might respond to the mob approach. So that’s what I did.

Took about 15 minutes to get home. First thing I did was look up contact numbers for law enforcement. While calling around I put on screen a live feed from inside the Capitol. By now the chambers should have been sealed, the lawmakers safely evacuated, and all cops ready to fight off the seditionists. But the networks had nothing on but lightweight chatter about this and that, killing time between whatever was the next step in the vote-affirming process. Apparently they had no idea what was going on a few hundred feet away.

You all know the rest. The president sent people to Congress to stop the count by whatever means, to kill the vice president and members of the Democratic party as needed. “No One Could Have Predicted”®. My witnessing became everyone’s witnessing.