What stupid things did you do because you were angry about the Capitol riots?

Politics & Elections
1

I did a couple of really stupid things because I was angry about the Capitol riots: One during the riots, and one shortly afterward.

During the riots, I walked into my landlord’s living room, where he was watching the news with his wife and son. My landlord’s the type who still wears his MAGA hat, five months into the Biden Administration. I said, “So… when’s your guy gonna tell his people to knock this crap out?” He tried to say that Trump had, in fact, done so, and he sorta had, but took such a weak-sauce way of doing it. “Go home; you’re special; we love you.”

And I shouldn’t have tried to play in my online roleplaying game on the day of the Capitol riots. I’m involved in a fantasy written roleplaying game, and one of my characters interviewed someone else for a position at a noble house. The interview was interrupted by someone higher up the food chain than myself, who suggested that maybe the noble himself would want to sit in on the interview. My character told her, quite truly, that she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the noble in the last several months, and that she wasn’t doing anything that she hadn’t done several times before.

The noble came in almost immediately afterward, read my character the riot act, and threatened to toss her out of the house on her ear. Ultimately, I came to the realization that I wasn’t getting any respect for all the hard work I’d been doing the previous two months in recruiting people to that house, so I left and joined another house.

Maybe those two things weren’t particularly dramatic on a personal scale, but they were for me, anyway.

What did you do in the heat of anger because you hated seeing what was happening to our country during the Capitol riots?

2

I smoked almost half an ounce of good weed in two days. I think that’s probably the only thing that kept me from stroking out while I was watching it in real time.

3

I got into an argument with my mom.

That phone call didn’t happen until a few weeks after the event, but it was a significant factor. While things were still happening on January 6, I learned that the small company I work for had just lost our largest client, and as a result there were going to be layoffs (I was told I was safe, but someone who worked close to me and had been here longer was one of the ones to go).

That same week, my elderly Ukrainian mother-in-law was taken to the hospital with Covid, and my wife joined her a little over a week later. She sent an email to helpfully let me know that she wasn’t going to contact me for a while, because she couldn’t access the Internet while in the hospital.

I was a bit of a wreck for a couple of weeks after that, during which time I called my mother for comfort, which she provided admirably.

When I finally received the email from my wife that she was home from the hospital, and we would talk on Skype that evening. When I gleefully shared the news with my co-workers, they informed me that we had just had a major problem, and while it was not any fault of mine, fixing the issue fell squarely in my lap.

That evening, my wife gave me the whole story and that both she and her mother were back home and doing fine. Interestingly enough, while her mother had tested positive for Covid-19, my wife tested negative, which I assume was because she was symptomatic for over a week beforehand.

So the next day I called my mother to share the good news. Now, while I love my mother dearly, our politics differ quite sharply, and she is never shy about sharing her opinions with me. Over the previous year, the subject of Covid came up many times, each time sharing essentially what the Fox News narrative was at the time.

So while sharing the story with my mom, somehow the subject of Covid came up again. After telling her how my wife had tested negative, she had an opinion to share about the trustworthiness of Covid testing, and my emotional state at the time left me with no fuse or filter.

Now, the “discussion” we had was something that was long coming, as I had previously held my tongue on many contentious topics in previous conversations, and I was able to get several things off my chest. At the same time, I learned many more details about my mother’s positions. So I am glad that we had that conversation, and the only thing I regret is everything that I actually said.

Fortunately, we are both still mature adults, so apologies were made and fences were mended. We exchanged a couple of emails afterwards on a few of the subjects brought up, and for the last six months I’ve been working on a coherent and respectful response that maybe I should abandon altogether.