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Zooming into the Coup
My eleven year old watched the coup at home over Zoom. Her journalism teacher said hello to all the students’ little faces in all their little boxes and then turned on the news. Within a few clips, my daughter caught up on everything I’d been following all day.
She knew that a treasonous mob stormed the US Capitol. (Is storming the right word for it since the Capitol Police let them in and then took selfies with them? A question for another day, perhaps.) She knew a woman involved in the riot got shot in the neck. (Since her class it’s been confirmed the woman is dead.) She knew the President incited the insurrection. (She knew the gravity of this before Twitter did.)
I was in my 9th grade math class when the planes hit the Twin Towers. I wanted my mom and dad. America changed for me that day. As I watched her watch the news, I thought she’d feel America undergo an unsettling shift. So, during a break, I went over and sat next to her and held her hand,
“Hey, sugar. I know this is upsetting. Want to talk this out before class starts again?”
She didn’t need comforting. There’d been no great shift. She looked confused by my distress,
“Isn’t this kind of normal? Doesn’t this happen when we switch presidents?”
