New year, same old crap. Tomorrow marks the Feast of the Epiphany or Three Kings — otherwise known as the Twelfth Day of Christmas or Twelfth Night — a time that should be one of revelry as the Christmas season reaches its climax. Instead it’s also the first anniversary of the insurrection of the Capitol, which from the get-go has been recast as a tourist excursion run amok, a peaceful protest infiltrated by Antifa and bungled by Capitol Police, a riot exploited by Democrats — anything and everything but what it was, which was an assault on the Capitol and our democracy by Trump supporters who bought into yet another fiction, that he had been robbed of victory in his bid for re-election.
The real question here is how is it possible for people to believe something other than the facts that are staring them in the face? The votes were recounted ad nauseam. Even Republican states certified them. Along with numbers, we have images. Those faces at the Capitol weren’t Black Lives Matter faces or Antifa faces. Those were MAGA faces.
The people who were marauding, looting, inflicting bodily harm, urinating and defecating in and on. a hallowed public space weren’t libs pretending to be right wingers. No one is that good an actor, not even Olivier. And as was quite clear from their comments, they' weren’t the most gifted lot, were they?
So why is it so hard to accept the truth? Precisely because the truth tends to be inconvenient. It goes against the grain of power, money, status. But most of all, it requires rationality. The truth never makes an emotional argument. It does not spin a false narrative. It’s not relative. There aren’t many truths that enable you to own yours. There is but one truth in any situation and it is incontrovertible.
The truth of Jan. 6 is that a bunch of people angry at the government and the fact that white people are becoming a majority-minority in this country thought they could muscle the election results in their favor. That’s the truth. But to accept that you also have to accept that there are people who swallowed the misanthropic snake oil Trump was selling. No one wants to be taken for a fool, so they had to spin a narrative in which Trump and they were the heroes — and others, the villains.
In this, they were greatly aided by social media, which spreads false narratives like wildfire. Consider Covid and the endless false vaccine narratives of we don’t know what’s in it, it doesn’t cure the virus so why take it, it shouldn’t be mandated, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Here’s what we do know: Those who get sick from the virus now are overwhelmingly unvaccinated, so while the vaccines don’t stop Covid, they mitigate its effects.
We also know, as one doctor starkly put it, that there are two paths to herd immunity. One goes through vaccination; the other, through the graveyard. If we could get 85 to 90 percent of the world vaccinated, Covid would be the common cold.
Instead we have death by a thousand spoons as the virus keeps mounting a comeback and people twist themselves into pretzels to avoid the vaccine. They have kidney disease. Their mother got the shot and had breathing trouble. The cat ate their homework. You get the drift. Look, people with cancer have been vaccinated, so short of some rare allergy, I can’t imagine what kind of medical exemption could be granted.
And yet there was the Australian Open giving Novak Djokovic a medical exemption for the tournament, which starts Jan. 17, an exemption that proved moot when the Australian government denied him a visa, because he’s unvaccinated. (The Aussies aren’t the only ones hanging tough. French President Emmanuel Macron used some colorful language to announce that he’s about to make life tough for the unvaxed.)
If you’re a reader of this blog, you know I love Djokovic. But I don’t love anyone at the expense of the truth. And the truth here is that Djokovic is risking the chance to overtake Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer for most Slam titles on the men’s side simply because he doesn’t believe in vaccines.
What he should do is swallow his pride and fear, get a vaccine that is helping to save lives in an international health crisis and live to win another tournament — and fight another day.