Sorry that it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. But best wishes to all for 2024.
Every January 1, our Spiritual Center has a New Year’s Visioning session in which we receive guidance about what we are to do this year, and has an optional Vision Board Creation workshop afterward. The picture above is a quote I found in a magazine that I placed at the center of my Vision Board. But if there are Superheroes among us, surely Cher and Dolly Parton are two of them!
January 6th used to be a tradition in our family. It is Epiphany, or the 12th Day of Christmas, the day the Wise Men arrived to deliver their presents to the baby Jesus. We are not a specifically Christian family–more spiritual than religious and more interdenominational that Christian or anything else–but Christmas is our big holiday. So our son, at least…sometimes others…got a final gift that morning, then we spent the day packing away the Christmas decorations and taking out the live Christmas tree and generally bringing closure to the holiday, usually having a dinner of Mexican or Hispanic origin since that culture celebrates Dia de Los Reyes more than other cultures.
However, I wasn’t able to follow that tradition this year.
First of all, my son’s college was beginning a week earlier than it had been. And since he had been on a study abroad program last semester, I had to take him up yesterday to college to get signed up for his room and such during the work week when the regular staff was around. Therefore, since he is the muscle in the family now, we (mostly he) had taken down the Christmas decorations and took the tree to tree recycling into mulch and such last week before he left.
But perhaps more than that, the joy of Three Kings Day has been eclipsed by my horror and sadness about what happened on January 6, 2021. Right now, in my heart, January 6th feels more like Insurrection Day than Epiphany.
I typically want my blogs to be uplifting and not political. The reason I love Christmas so much is to me it is a celebration of love, abundance, and joy…even if it falls short in the observation, in ways big and small. The reason I love our American democracy, as flawed as it has been at times, is that I think it is meant as an expression of freedom and equality, although clearly we haven’t achieved that universally yet. So to me, what happened on January 6, 2021, was an assault on those values BY SOME in violent and illegal ways. We can disagree, but we can never allow that disagreement to descend to physical attack … in my opinion. But to me, that is exactly what happened January 6, 2021.
So I was struggling to figure out what to do to move to a positive place on this day. The weather didn’t help. I woke up to a gray, cold morning with driving rain. Did I want to get out of bed? No. However, it was Farmers Market Saturday. The farmers had produce that they needed to sell. So the first thing I did to put positivity into the day was to get up and go to the Cary Downtown Farmers Market in the cold pouring rain and to buy things from as many of the vendors as I could justify without buying stuff that would go to waste because I couldn’t eat it.
Then I continued my Three Kings Day tradition by myself by cleaning up the Christmas mess that hadn’t required my son’s assistance…wrapping paper and empty boxes and just general stuff that needs to be either thrown away or put away. I also cleared out the refrigerator and threw out mostly empty stuff (both my son and my husband have a bad habit of eating all but a teaspoon of a container of stuff and leaving it in the refrigerator so I think we have stuff but we don’t), made a vegetable soup out of various vegetable leftovers, and putting unredeemable leftovers into our composting receptical. I also wrote a couple of thank you notes for the lovely gifts we received over the holidays.
Then I got an email. It was one of the hundreds of emails I generally get every day. It was an email from someone I didn’t know and someone I had not asked to correspond with me. You know, one of those emails you just delete automatically because who can read all of the unsolicited emails we get every day?
But fortunately, I didn’t just delete this email. Because it totally turned around this day for me.
The email was from a man named Harry Dunn. He was one of the Capitol Police Officers who defended our US Capitol and our US Congress from those who were attacking the facility. As a black man, he experienced not only the violence from SOME of the crowd breaking in, but a number of racial slurs. He protected everyone in the Congress, regardless of their party and/or whether he agreed with their political positions.
Later, he testified before Congress about the violent nature of the crowd he helped to turn back. He also wrote a book about his experience.
So today, January 6, 2024, he announced his candidacy to run for US Representative in Maryland, the state in which he was born and raised and lives today. He says his main reason for running is to speak out against those who are trying to deny or downplay or justify the first insurrection against our democratic system of electing our representatives since the Civil War. And who better to testify about that then someone who was in the middle of defending that system? Among the many videos I subsequently watched, in at least one he said what my Vision Board quote above stated: that he couldn’t stand around and wait for someone else to come save us when he experienced what he had experienced that day. No one is coming to save us; we need to save ourselves.
He is running in a competitive district, so who knows if he will be elected. But here is another thing that I love about this man. He quit the Capitol Police Force a few week ago, four years before he was eligible for full retirement benefits. It is easy to run for office when you aren’t risking anything (he says most of his opponents are state representatives so they will keep their jobs even if they lose). But a man who experienced what I think is one of the worst times in American democracy and decided to give up financial security to take a shot at trying to turn things around…to me, that is a double hero.
I have long established (other than my Internet political boyfriend, Cory Booker…see previous posts) that I give my limited political donations to candidates in my own state of North Carolina, which is a purple-ish-ish state. But today I’m making an exception for Harry Dunn. My donation is small, but I want to support him in a campaign of speaking out about what it was actually like that day.
So I think that discovering Harry Dunn was my gift for today. He is my vehicle for taking a stand against what I think was appalling behavior made even more appalling by those who have excused behavior that was clearly not democratic. Donating to him for me is a wonderful Epiphany gift.
If you are interested in hearing more about Harry Dunn, here is his candidacy announcement:
This includes a written op-ed and a verbal discussion with Harry Dunn about his beliefs, entitled “Opinion: The Brutality and Racism I Saw on January 6”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/06/opinions/harry-dunn-january-6-anniversary-run-for-congress-dunn
And if you would also like to donate to his campaign, you can do so here:
Giving to his campaign has allowed me to return to Dia de los Reyes as a day of giving. I hope you experience that today as well, however it shows up for you.
blissfullu.com 
Thank you for sharing all you included.
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