In the Christian calendar, today is the Feast of the Epiphany. In some traditions it’s called Three Kings Day, and it’s when children get presents (as Baby Jesus did from the Magi).
For most of the U.S. (and people watching around the globe), today is marked not as a religious holiday, but as the second anniversary of the attempted coup d’etat by the MAGAts, Nazis, etc. at the behest and instigation of the sack of utter toxic waste that is Donald J Trump and his acolytes (Josh Hawley, etc).
As I type, we are about to have the 13th straight vote on House Speaker, because the current crop of Republican representatives are being held hostage by a dozen white supremacists/Nazis/MAGAts, which in turn is holding the entire lower Chamber of Congress hostage.
(UPDATE, less than an hour after publication: traitor Kevin McCarthy has lost the vote again; for the first time, he got more votes (2) than Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries, but he’s still short of the majority required to elect a House Speaker for the 118th Congress)
Next Friday, January 13th, is the deadline to have a Speaker elected, so that House committees staff can be paid–and the motherfuckers enacting this shitshow in the U.S. Capitol couldn’t give less of a fuck if they worked at it.
I’m not religious, so I’m not praying about it, but mostly hoping that there are enough people who can see the pattern of emerging fascism in the U.S. that’s been hitting us all in the face for about seven years now, to actually do something to stop the disintegration of the county.
January 6th 2021 was the third time I lived through an attempted coup; the first two were in Venezuela in the early/mid 1990s. Here’s hoping the U.S. does not become either a one-party rule country or an outright dictatorship, but honestly, the Nazi/MAGAt circus on C-SPAN at the moment does not bode well for democracy here.
Her Hands, My Hands 
Hello my friend, today is the Feast of Theophany for Orthodox Christians, including those in Ukraine and Russia…so, nothing is boding terribly well for anyone. It celebrates Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan by one “voice crying in the wilderness” (not much different from today for those particular voices), St. John the Baptist. It is a day when things are made new by water and the spirit and I only hope the same for your country and mine and those bent on killing each other.
I haven’t lived through an attempted coup other than my neighbours’ January 6th, but I’ve seen what a successful one wrought in Greece in the late sixties to early seventies.
Coups are terrible for most of the people who live through them; if not in the immediate violence, shortly after.
Only the people at the top tend to benefit; but then, those same people benefit no matter what, their money insulates them from most everything.
Growing up with the rah-rah of American exceptionalism and then seeing what a fucking mess this country is. Wild. And the number of Americans who are okay letting fascism enter because it “owns the libs”.
Anyway, I’m glad to be old because I assume I’ll be dead before it gets too bad. Yeah. That’s the plan for the future: die. Because we have enough people in this country who think that what’s happening isn’t a portent for what’s worse that’s coming at us. We are so fucked.
I am sorry, my friend. And I’m sad to say that there’s many a day where I feel exactly like this.
What else is there for us old folk? How much fight and resistance can we put up when we’ve been beaten down by life in a late-stage über capitalistic nation?
But I hope, for the sake of younger people (including my own adult offspring), that we can do something about it.
Because if we don’t, many more will die not of old age, but direct violence (more than they already die, at the hands of cops or intimate partner violence, or just gun stupidity)