Since the violent storming of the Capitol January 6th, we’ve heard repeated calls for unity and peace.  While unity and peace are desirable and some making such appeals, including President Biden, are sincere, nonetheless, many calls are also coming from those who were sowing division just days before.  Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, Minority Whip of the House Republicans, solemnly borrowed Lincoln’s words “with malice toward none” for his speech on Trump’s second impeachment.  He was speaking those words on the House floor to a peaceful gathering of U.S. Representatives debating the impeachment of Donald Trump, not the violent rabble that had gathered outside the Capitol days earlier.  Scalise had been one of the 147 legislators who persisted in contesting Biden’s election, even after the mob attacked the Capitol.  Scalise and those like him have always wanted a cheap and threadbare unity, the kind that comes without the high cost of justice.

For peace and unity to endure, there needs to be truth, reparation, and reconciliation in that order.  The truth is a beleaguered idea these days, and easily manipulated to be sure. Scalise and others want to put off accountability and reparation in the name of searching out the truth.  We do want the truth, and it will take a long time to sort through the events of January 6^th, but we know enough truth now to begin to hold people accountable.  “Getting to the truth” can just be another delaying tactic meant to postpone justice.  So California Representative Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader, wants to establish a fact-finding commission rather than impeach Trump. This is the same kind of shenanigans that Senator Ted Cruz tried to pull January 6^th, when he argued for setting up an electoral commission to investigate the election.  We knew the results of the presidential election for two months when Cruz spoke those words, a mere hour before the violent mob broke into the Capitol.  We had the truth; Senator Cruz and others simply didn’t want to face it.  So yes, the truth needs to be sought out, as is the case with many of the details from January 6^th; yet when we have the truth we need to face it.  The truth we have is that on January 6^th Trump incited a violent insurrection at the Capitol endangering the lives of many and jeopardizing our very democracy.  We do not need to wait for any more truth to come to light before impeaching and convicting Donald Trump.  We do not need to search the archives and to investigate the crime scene to know that never before had American citizens violently assaulted the Capitol until January 6^th, an infamous, ill-omened day.  Another truth that needs to be spoken by those now calling for unity is that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election honestly; there was no widespread voter fraud or conspiracy against Donald Trump.  Until that truth can be spoken, we will get no further on our way to unity.

Once we know the truth, we are obligated to face it and act upon it to bring about reparation for the harm done.  This is the work of justice.  America has a sordid past with truth and justice.  We take too long to get to the truth and justice is often denied until the next generation or never.  Nowhere is this more evident than with the treatment of Native Americans and Black Americans.  White Americans need to recognize that we and the mob at the Capitol are the descendants of those who for decades and centuries obscured the truth and denied justice to Black and Native peoples.  In fact, that historic failure played no small part in the mob’s ability to storm the Capitol.  If we had done our civic duty to repair the wrong we had historically committed, either there would have never been a mob at the Capitol or there would have been a hell of a lot more security to ward them off and arrest them.

Instead, what we saw at the Capitol was the result of centuries of over-policing BIPOC communities and under-policing White communities, particularly those on the far-right, who have been free to terrorize lawmakers and fellow citizens with near impunity.  Those who tuned in on January 6^th to get a civics lesson on presidential elections got a lesson in white privilege and the existential threat it presents to our democracy.  We need to repair this wrong, which means holding accountable and bringing to justice those who brought violence to the U.S. Capitol.  We also need to face the endemic racism in this country.  There is no way around this reckoning; we need to go through it, and we will whether we choose to or not.  As the ancient Stoics taught, either we can go willingly with fate or fate can drag us along unwillingly (Seneca, Moral Epistles 107.11, ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt).

Reconciliation, the next step, is not peace and unity, which are the fruit of truth, reparation, and reconciliation.  Reconciliation is the mutual awareness that justice has been carried out.  Only when we recognize what has happened and what has been sacrificed to create justice can we be reconciled.  After justice has been done, we need to decide whether to go on together.  It is unclear at this point whether Americans want to have a future together.  Reconciliation happens when we can say that despite our past and the injuries we have caused one another and the price of justice, we have found a reason to love one another still.  At that point, we can begin to live in unity and peace.  It is a day that is far off I fear.