82. D.C. and Covid get personal

In the wake of the January 6 debacle at the Capitol, three Democratic members of Congress have tested positive for Covid-19. New Jersey Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, a 75 year-old cancer survivor, Illinois Representative Brad Schneider, and Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal all announced positive tests after being warned by the Capitol physician that they might have been exposed during the lockdown. 

There might be—will surely be—others, as Republicans and Democrats huddled together in secure rooms for more than five hours while insurgents were cleared and Congressional chambers secured and cleaned. Nancy Pelosi had made masks a requirement for the House Floor, but the instinctive refusal of Covid seriousness and mask effectiveness was stronger for some Republican representatives than any collegial pleas that they wear them in hiding. 

 

Schneider and Jayapal both condemned the mask-less behavior. Schneider worried that he had then exposed family, and all three now must decide how to conduct Congressional business in the next important days. 

 

It is absolutely beyond me that “the mask” has become such a symbol of party and politics. But watching January 6 unfold on the TV screen was beyond me as well. And watching the continuing denial by many, largely along party lines, in the face of rising Covid numbers and deaths, is beyond me as well.

 

Pramila is not. She is my friend as well as a Congresswoman, and I watched her on NBC, hunkering below the seats in the House gallery as the melee downstairs roared. There was fear on her face, and on the face of many as they were led to safety. Contrasted with the absolute glee on the faces of painted and red-hatted people—mostly white and mostly male—vandalizing the Capitol, calling for Nancy Pelosi, shouting that Pence be hanged. 

 

That mob resembled the Iranians who “captured” Americans in our embassy in 1979, and imprisoned them for 444 days, the Hindu mobs beating Muslim neighbors and burning mosques in Delhi, India this past February, and the not too distant public executions known as lynchings in our own country. 

 

And the Representatives and staffers you can see on video, clearly refusing to take masks offered them in their Capitol safe room, remind me of the often smug-faced on-lookers in those chilling photographs of mobs committing violence in Tehran and Delhi, and the sometimes sober-faced but oft-times laughing witnesses to lynchings in America.  

 

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