Two Januaries

It’s the first Tuesday of the month—January 6, 2026. I remember where and how I was five years ago today: holed up in my office, up in the finished attic of our previous home, cold but cozy, laboring desperately and fruitlessly to finish some mildly overdue items for a client, making no progress whatsoever, instead watching video feeds on C-SPAN and texting furiously with Liana and various friends. My consulting partner on that project (hi Jennifer! miss you & hope you are well) created a little wiggle room for us that day. People die only the once, but ideals fall again and again, and either way the absence and grief is felt whole-heartedly.

Yesterday was the first day back at work for many of us who had the good fortune to enjoy some downtime or time away around the end of the year. I felt tense going into the weekend, not from apprehension about returning to work but rather from worry about what they’d do on—or for—the fifth anniversary of January 6. I needn’t have waited. In 1992 Leonard Cohen sang that he couldn’t “run no more with that lawless crowd / while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud.” In the current circumstance the killers skipped the praying in favor of congregating in front of a wall-sized display with results of a search on X dot com for ‘Venezuela.’

Square that with the expectation that work happens underneath a context-free, ahistorical capitalist realism dome; in this dome the past is about two months long and the future extends only as far out as the end of the quarter or the next round of asinine bulk layoffs. I see cracks in the dome. I wonder what might shine through.

Three responses

How to respond in these conditions? I see three ways:

  1. The first response is to remember. I wrote recently about undiscussables and shifting baselines. In both cases I think this is what I was really on about. We have to remember this, so we can give an account of what happened, and hold to account those responsible, and produce a better place in its aftermath, restoring rights and generating protections for all.
  2. Another is to take time & show care. People are hurting, worried, scared. These are best antidotes I know of, at least on a the scale of local, daily interactions.
    1. Taking time: this looks like 90 minutes with friends instead of 60; showing up early to arrange chairs and cushions into an inviting circle; and joining a few calls or meetings that are not strictly necessary but I hope will be beneficial.
    2. Showing care: helping people around me ease back into things. At work this means a deliberate, gentle reiteration of commitments and arrangements. What have we all signed up for? By what method will we try to it get it done? We might adjust as needed, but largely I think people just need to hear it again.
  3. A final response is to do what we can. My city elected its new mayor, someone I know and respect and for whose campaign our whole family was proud to volunteer. He’ll be sworn in at the top of tonight’s city council meeting. There is a sense that this is the start of something good, despite the limitations of that position and other constraints in place.

These three are incomplete, but it’s what I have, and how I’m operating right now.