It was January 6, and I stood watching my television screen with both hands over my mouth. My gut was roiling. My body shivered with random surges of fight-or-flight adrenaline as a flag-waving mob tried to lay siege to our center of government.
How can this be happening? I kept saying. Is this … real?? The answer, of course, was yes. And more importantly: no.
But by day’s end, I had come to a realization even more frightening than the makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol lawn: This could just as well have been us.