This is just the beginning
Opening night of the House Select Committee hearings was chilling, and hearing U.S. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards’ testimony was frightening. To think that this young woman signed up to protect and serve only to be injured by fellow “Americans” is heartbreaking. She suffered brain injuries, and she described the event as “carnage” and “chaos.” Yet, she got up after hitting her head on the concrete steps to continue to try to protect her fellow officers and innocent bystanders. Edwards described the scene as a war battle ground, and she confessed that she and other officers had never been trained to fight wars. They certainly never expected to fight one at the foot of the Capitol. She also witnessed Brian Sicknick after he was attacked and described him as “ghostly pale.” She knew he was in trouble.
Rolling Stone described how Sicknick’s family never heard one word from Donald Trump to express condolences. “Not one tweet, not one note, not one card-nothing from him, because he knows. He knows he is the cause of the whole thing,” Ken Sicknick told CNN’s John Berman. The Sicknick brothers refuse to listen to anyone trying to downplay what happened on January 6, and who can blame them? They lost their brother to senseless violence as he tried to do his job and protect the Capitol. Ken Sicknick calls those who refuse to acknowledge what happened or to even learn more by watching the hearings “ignorant.” Like many others, the Sicknick family wants justice, and they are pointing at Donald Trump who they said, “has never paid the price for anything he has done his entire life.” No truer words have been spoken. Perhaps these hearings will do that, but the problem is that people who don’t want to know the truth and prefer to live in their alternative realities will not watch; however, many others are watching.
Fred Kaplan of Slate magazine wrote: “I tuned in to the January 6 hearings Thursday night, doubtful that they would be nearly as compelling as the Watergate hearings. I was wrong: The first night of these hearings was in fact more riveting than the first month of the hearings that eventually drove Richard Nixon out of office.” He went on to say: “The case that the committee made against Donald Trump as the ringleader of the Capitol insurrection was slam-dunk convincing.” Of course it was. It didn’t help when the committee showed video of Trump’s own daughter, who said she accepted AG William Barr’s assessment that there was no fraud in the 2020 election. Yet, Trump couldn’t accept the word of his most trusted advisors and instead unleashed this terror on the Capitol.
Trump can try all he likes to act innocent, but none of this would have happened had he simply accepted the decision of the people and, for once in his stint as president, behaved presidentially. He has no civility in him, and that was made even more apparent on January 6. Trump must pay. He must be publicly blamed, and he must pay.
Shirley is a former entertainment writer and has worked in the legal field for over 25 years