Seniors' Opinions on the Capitol Insurrection

After the events of January 6th, Diane canceled AP Psych class and instead asked us to email her with our thoughts on what happened. Both in my own writing and talking with friends about the assignment, I started to think about what the effects of this event would be on my generation—how will we think about democracy? The Office of the President? Justice? In Diane’s words, thematically “the responses from the students ranged from extreme sadness to anger. Most said while they were ‘shocked.’ they were not ‘surprised.’ I also felt that all responses were astute, deeply personal, and inspiring… Frankly, I found myself becoming quite emotional while reading them.” It’s too early to say for sure, but I could tell from everyone’s responses that we all have powerful feelings about what this means for our future. Students Maddy Eatchel, Cole McCartney, and Calvin Barbanell were willing to share their full emails with me. I read those and compared them to my own to pull out some common threads, which I describe below.

The first theme that stood out to me was a general air of pessimism across all the responses friends shared with me. In my email, I wrote that “the US is stuck in this misguided romantic idea of its past that celebrates innovations and ideas that came about from the oppression of marginalized groups. I feel like I've spent all of high school being involved in activism and trying to better the community, and I'm looking forward to doing the same in college, but right now it's so difficult to feel any optimism that things will get better on a national level.” Meanwhile, Maddy Eatchel, a senior, wrote, “I don’t believe in fairness. I don’t believe in justice. I don’t believe in equality. While I will still vote in the next election, while I will still go to rallies and sign petitions, I don’t truly believe that anything I do makes a difference.” For teenagers, this event is one of many that keeps getting labelled a “fluke” by older generations, but it seems for us to be a sustained pattern that adds up to a deep unease about our future. I think from our perspective, these kinds of political catastrophes are all we’ve known.

To many of us, the future of American democracy looks grim. As senior Calvin Barbanell wrote, “both parties have begun to become more stubborn in their ways and more disconnected from each other, and, most importantly, less willing to compromise.” Similarly, I wrote that “the Republican party has gotten away with becoming more and more right-wing extreme because the Democrats can't figure out what their platform is. Politicians need to stop pretending that making a deal with a neo-nazi is a compromise.” Despite the Trump era having ended, we see cracks in our democracy that will go beyond the past administration. “I'm angry because nothing is going to change after this event,” I wrote, “and because I'm sick of people saying ‘oh this isn't how America is’” because for our generation, this is exactly how we see the US. We grew up with unsettled US hegemony, economic crises, polarizing presidential elections, and now a coup. What else are we supposed to think about the US?

The seniors’ responses also revealed the acknowledgement of double standards in our democracy. Cole McCartney focused on the funding of US counterterrorism, writing, “from unfair surveillance on Muslim Americans (like they've been doing for awhile now), further militarizing the US police, to bombing innocent children in the Middle East (the US has proven to be pretty incompetent and horrible there). I don't think we're really going to address the roots of white supremacy (especially since it's so prevalent in the institutions that are meant to tackle it), and any efforts to prevent future incidents will be pretty useless/misused.” Because of technology, I think my generation has such a globalized understanding of current events that allows us to see the contradictions with the US’s domestic and international actions. But, even domestically the attempted coup at the Capitol revealed the double standards between black and white protesters. “Because these rioters were white, they were allowed to invade the Capitol, bring weapons, destroy property, and hang out for hours after leaving with virtually no repercussions from police,” I wrote, “Meanwhile, Black people are literally getting killed by police with no justice… Obviously, destroying property is a crime, but when peaceful protesting doesn't stop Black people from being killed, it's understandable to turn to more direct actions. That's not even close to what happened on Wednesday—those people were terrorists whose only goal was to start a coup. Their goal was to overturn a democratic process because they lost.”

Diane’s assignment gave us an outlet to voice our own opinions. As she wrote, the seniors “truly have so many vital things to say with far-reaching consequences. Let's face it, they are our country's and our world's future.” From the students I talked to, we seem to have a pretty somber outlook on the future. I hope, though, our experiences will help shape our own future as our generation becomes the new politicians, world leaders, and active citizens. We seem to recognize the flaws in the system—the limitation of two parties, the rejection of compromise, systemic white supremacy—and I hope we can turn our awareness into action. Already, we are seeing historic impacts like a second impeachment of Trump and the most votes to impeach a president of the same party. Hopefully, there is accountability for the people involved in this coup and we can move forward with more belief in our system.