Where Where You When Democracy Was Attacked?

An American reckoning, five years after the insurrection

Unified Nassau Florida, January 6, 2026

Intro Note:

January 6, 2021 was a turning point in American history, one that tested our democracy in ways many of us never imagined. Five years later, this piece is a quiet act of remembrance, and a reflection on what happens when a nation begins to forget before it has fully reckoned.

Five years ago, our country suffered an insurrection.

Not a disturbance.

Not a protest that went too far.

An attempt; open, violent, and deliberate, meant to overturn the will of the people.

Thinking back to that day, I find myself asking questions that still do not have easy answers.

What were you thinking as you watched it unfold?

Were you appalled?

Were you frightened?

Or were you simply… numb?

Where were you when the doors of the Capitol were breached?

When elected officials hid under desks?

When a mob; fueled by lies, entitlement, and rage, roamed the halls of American democracy searching for enemies?

And the hardest question of all:

Were you okay with it?

Not cheering.

Not participating.

Just okay enough to turn the channel.

Okay enough to tell yourself it would all blow over.

Okay enough to believe it wasn’t really that bad.

January 6, 2021 was not just an attack on a building. It was a moment of moral clarity, or moral evasion. A test of whether democracy was something we merely inherited, or something we were willing to defend.

At first, there was shock.

Disbelief.

That hollow, disorienting feeling that comes when reality breaks through denial.

And then, briefly, there was resolve.

We said this cannot stand.

We said this is not who we are.

We said there must be consequences.

For a moment, it felt as though the country had remembered itself.

But moments pass.

And memory, it turns out, can become faded.

Language softened.

Edges blurred.

What was once called an insurrection became a “riot,” then an “incident,” then, by some, an act of patriotism.

Accountability stalled.

Silence crept in.

And eventually, the unthinkable happened: those who tried to overthrow democracy were released, forgiven, even celebrated.

The resolve we felt, the shared understanding that something sacred had been violated, was quietly taken from us.

Today, five years later, the consequences of that forgetting surround us.

The people who once stormed the Capitol walk free, some restored to power, some entrusted with authority. Meanwhile, immigrants, many here legally, many seeking safety, many doing exactly what the law requires are treated as criminals. Families are torn apart. Fear is weaponized. Cruelty is justified.

Somewhere along the way, our moral compass reversed.

Those who attacked democracy were absolved.

Those who seek a life within it are hunted.

And the cost of that forgetting does not stop at our borders. Even now, as this anniversary passes, the world is witnessing fresh acts of political violence and upheaval so immediate, so traumatic, that they scarcely have language yet. What is chilling is not only the suffering itself, but the recognition that our own country is now pushing forward a kind of world change whose consequences we do not yet understand, and may not know how to reverse, once power is unmoored from accountability.

This did not happen overnight.

It did not begin yesterday.

It grew in the quiet spaces where accountability was deemed “too divisive,” where truth was treated as optional, where we were urged to move on rather than look honestly at what had been done.

And so I ask the question again, not as accusation, but as invitation:

Are we okay with this?

I find myself thinking of an old song, one that carries the weight of history and loss:

Where have all the flowers gone?

Where did our certainty go that democracy mattered, that truth mattered, that cruelty was wrong even when it was legal?

The flowers did not vanish all at once.

They were trampled slowly.

Excused quietly.

Forgotten deliberately.

And now we stand here, five years later, surveying the ground and wondering how it came to look so barren.

This is not a call to rage.

It is not a demand for purity.

It is a plea for memory.

Because remembering is not passive.

It is an act of resistance.

If we can remember January 6 for what it truly was,

If we can hold onto the grief instead of numbing it,

If we can refuse to normalize what should never have been acceptable,

Then perhaps the flowers are not gone forever.

Perhaps they are only waiting.

The question now is not what happened then,

but what we will choose next.