When the pro-Trump protesters left the White House, before they transformed into a mob of insurgents and thugs, when they were nothing but a moving sea of flags prodding past the barren elm trees of Pennsylvania Avenue, with their eyes only barely turned toward the Capitol: I thought of a day not long ago when a car nearly hit my daughter.
It happened the day after Christmas, when I had taken my two daughters on a walk around the neighbourhood. Not only was it the perennial quietest day of the year; it was also the first day of yet another pandemic lockdown in Ontario. It was 6 p.m. — though the early darkness made it feel like midnight — and there was not a soul on the streets, nor a driver on the roads. We had the world to ourselves.
We were walking past an elementary school, a side-road with speed bumps and a 30 km/h speed limit, a street with front lawns of inflatable snowmen and reindeer, and cedar bushes draped in Christmas lights. The recent snowfall had hardened over the street and sidewalk, which made it slippery, and it was there, as my 11-year-old balanced like a gymnast along the curb, I saw pair of headlights turn toward us.
For a brief moment, those headlights appeared just like that formless mass marching in Washington—nothing too out of the ordinary. But soon the headlights started swerving wildly from one side of the street to the other, and then I heard a throbbing beat pulsating through its metal frame, and as it drew nearer, as the trajectory of the headlights fell beneath my face, I saw a car, painted black as night with tinted windows, lose its traction and slide toward my child.
There was something in that moment, when that dark and ominous car came into view, that was terrifying. It is that feeling when you realize you are in territory far beyond the range of normal, like a swimmer bathing in the sea, unwittingly being carried out by the undertow, suddenly shocked to find himself in deeper waters. It is that same feeling that struck the world’s heart when the Trump crowd suddenly broke the lines of police and scaled the walls on the house of democracy, battering the doors with the very barricades they had broken.
What did you feel when the faces of the mob finally came into view? Was it not deeply distressing to see them hanging like wild apes from the scaffolding (no offense to apes), to see a QAnon shirt pursuing a black officer up the marble staircase, or to see their mad eyes peering through the punctured windows of the house chamber, undaunted at staring down the barrels of police who had barricaded lawmakers inside? And was it not also unsettling, in a different way, to see the gleeful and carefree way they strutted out the building, parading stolen memorabilia in their arms and taking pictures like tourists?
The banality of evil, so they say.
I managed to grab my daughter as the car slid within three feet of her. It continued to zigzag down the street and then disappeared around the corner, along with the last notes of its throbbing bass. Whether it was a drunk or a band of joyriders, I do not know, but I was quite shaken. Even later that night I kept flinching at what happened. How did a car like that appear on such an utterly desolate street, on the quietest of nights?
How did such a shameless attack on democracy happen in a country like America?
We came home unscathed that night. America did not. She was hit, and she was hit savagely. It’s not a fatal wound, but it looks infected, and she better be on guard, for I’m not entirely sure that same car won’t come around for another run.
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