Staunton Star - Times - Published in the Interest of the Staunton Community for Over 143 Years

Letter to the editor:

I have over the decades watched many congressional hearings. The hearings about the Americans held in Iran, the McCarthy-era hearings, the Watergate hearings, and others. All have left some compelling images in my mind. Now the January 6 hearings have concluded for the summer. This hearing has been remarkably free of the grandstanding that has marked the others. I'm disheartened that so many people have opted out of listening to the hearings. How can we make good decisions if we refuse to look at what has happened and is happening in our country?

What happened at the Capitol, in my opinion, was not a sudden, new outburst ordered by former President Trump. Instead, it was the decades long simmering hostility of groups of people, many undereducated, underemployed, overtaxed, and under-represented whom Trump and his allies recognized could be melded into a bloc. By appealing to their hatred of taxes, other people than white, bosses of any kind, religions of any but their own, their love of guns, and belief in conspiracies, Trump and his allies envisioned an America where their particular form of America could be realized. And in this pursuit any means justified their ends.

What is astounding to me is those who are smart, schooled, well off, and not obviously in the groups above going along with all the nonsense that occurred, is still occurring. Yes, they may admit, Trump was narcissistic, crude, uninformed, addicted to superlatives, a terrible speaker, okay with lying and making absurd statements, but his policies were so good for the country!

The Oklahoma bombing, the Texas standoff, all the racial conflicts, the Selma incidents and other relatively small insurrections were, I think, precursors to the Capitol invasion. Each were put down, investigated, blame assigned, convictions meted out, and pushed out of sight and thought to have been dealt with. But an idea, a movement, once born seldom dies completely. It is passed on to the next generations by the true believers who now have new resentments, new hatreds, new plots. A case in point is the neoNazis who were active immediately after WW2 and continue to this day.

What can be done is not clear. But change surely involves all parties listening to those whose ideas are not in the mainstream, involves schooling, involves churches, temples, and mosques acting up to their stated tenets, involves holding people responsible for their acts, involves responsible policing, involves giving up trying to make up for evils of the past to people who didn't live in the past, by people who also didn't live in the past, involves realizing that cities, states, and the country's purses aren't bottomless, involves facing up to the real needs of the country, involves making running for office less expensive, less dependent on big donors, involves some media restraint, involves voters who think.

Hulda Black, Staunton