“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” – Benjamin Franklin.

As his sufferings mounted, Martin Luther King wrote,  “I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”

What worked for King doesn’t seem to be working for us. There needs to be a new way to transform horror into a creative force.

That is what I decided to do when Donald Trump was elected; I saw a great spiritual challenge coming at me, although I did not imagine anything like what happened Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol. So I turned it into creativity.

As befitting a divided country, there is already another raging debate about what sort of justice should be handed out to our President, who watched TV happily while the capitol was under siege.

At the same time, roving mobs of supporters broke into the Capitol, terrorized legislators, stole what they could, desecrated what they could,  led one of their own to sacrifice, and still managed to kill a policeman.

They were, they boasted, launching a new kind of American Revolution, taking the country back for the people.

America had never seen anything like this; we are all struggling to deal with the aftermath. How did the police miss what even I saw – that January 6 would bring serious trouble?

Our President has promised us as much, and for months.

I have never compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and I don’t now.  Trump is much too weak to be another Hitler. Hitler would have been in front of that mob, smashing windows and breaking in, eager to go to jail for the crimes his supporters were committing.

Donald Trump is a coward; he gets other people to commit his crimes while he hides in his castle, watches TV, gets his face tanned and tweets threats and lies.

But on Wednesday, the images of the Reichstag fire kept coming to mind.

On February 27, 1933, the German parliament building  – the Reichstag – was attacked and burned to the ground. The Nazi leadership used the fire to claim that Communists were planning a violent uprising, in much the same way right-wing media commentators are trying to blame Antifa and the Democrats for the trashing of the capitol. The Nazi’s refused to accept election results that denied them power. The resulting legislation, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolished a number of constitution protections for Germany and paved the way for the Nazi dictatorship.

The people who burned the Reichstag down were also flag-waving white nationalists, also supported and encouraged by unmoored leaders who believed that they lied enough, people would come to believe them. They were right.

But evil is evil, and no one can really control where it goes, as Wednesday also proved. The attack on the capitol was not an outburst; it was a plot.

Most people at first believed the Nazis had plotted to burn the parliament down; they were not held accountable. Hitler just lied and lied until the lie became the country’s truth.

If you look at the transcripts and recordings of the Nazi storm troopers, you can hear and see the same smug and cruel gestures and words that we saw on Wednesday. They were saving the country, not destroying it.

This is important to understand. Our President brought great evil right to the heart and soul of our democracy.

History is a good guide to the dangers of injustice, turning a blind eye to evil, or rationalizing it, as some Republican senators are already doing just a day or so after Black Wednesday.

I’ve rolled my eyes at comparisons to our own white nationalists to Nazis; it seems so far from our culture and structure.

Aren’t we the country where that can’t happen? No, not now.

I wasn’t rolling my eyes on Wednesday, or today. When the police run in terror from the people, something elemental has been turned upside down.

This wasn’t just an attack on a building. The President who engineered this has to leave.

Donald Trump needs to be held accountable, and anyone who stands with him is not standing for truth, justice, or freedom.

We learn that there are real consequences for lying and hatred, especially when it becomes a new normal. Every lie that goes unpunished cuts a chunk out of us and the kind of country we want to be.

For a couple of hours, I learned what it must have felt like in Berlin in the 1930s, a sinking heart combining disbelief with anger and despair, watching something I never expected to see in America.

I suppose Williamstown was a tipoff; we sloughed off that one. Within weeks of Williamstown, CEOs were showing up at the White House to lunch with President Trump and praise him.

Why was the response to these white demonstrators  Wednesday so jarringly different from every single black protest that went on for weeks and months all over America in 2020?

Why have so many Americans excused and rationalized this behavior instead of blaming Trump, blamed Democrats, the ever-handy Antifa, and the media for the violence?

The answer isn’t that complex. We have lost any common idea of what truth or justice is. The challenge is to restore a common sense of what truth and justice are.

As a former police reporter, I could hardly believe that all of those people walked in and out of the capitol almost at will for hours with few, if any arrests. Where were the police in one of the most heavily policed cities on earth?

How could they have failed us so tragically? This has become a conspiracy theory all of its own, which is heartbreaking.

We are starting to get some answers. Our democracy, not just our capitol,  was under attack.

The countless black and brown children in America were absolutely correct in saying none of them would have made it up the capitol steps alive if they had done what Trump’s Storm Troopers had done.

All across the country, there were reports of black outrage at the double standards.

My stomach sank as hour after hour passed, and nobody came to a stop as our elected leaders ran for their lives.

This was the most powerful lesson in racism in America in my lifetime.  Joe Biden was wrong when he said the violence “was not who we are.” It is precisely who we are and have been from the first.

Blessedly, it is not all that we are.

Our own national truth begins there.

In the age of polarization and hyper-media and online tribalism, there is no such thing as reasoned and civil consideration of justice. Lying and hatred have become a profitable industry.

That should be against the law.

Whatever happens, to Donald Trump will not be nearly enough for many people, no matter how reasoned or just.

It’s true; lies beget lies, ignorance begets ignorance, hatred begets hatred. We have stood by quietly while our country has become an incubator of dishonesty and hatred.

Cicero said about justice. “For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is the right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.”

Justice isn’t about pleasing everyone, which is not possible in America right now. Justice is about doing the right thing insofar as we can sort it out and see it.

Lincoln believed that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. I think history has shown us this is true. Trump deserves mercy. So do his followers.

But what is justice in the case of Donald Trump, who brazenly and repeatedly inspired this evil, cheered it on, refused to help end it or stop it, and celebrated it at every opportunity.

And what is mercy in a situation like this?

I think mercy is remembering that many millions of people voted for Trump and support him still. To me, that is the sickness afflicting our country right now and the source of our despair.

But they are not all one thing, they are many things.

Trump and his followers should be treated forcefully, but also with respect, even the people who broke into the capitol. But they must still be held accountable.

They are victims too, and Wednesday was no victory for them, but a profound defeat. They will not get what they want, and they must not get what they want. They came out into the open way too soon, and they will pay for it.

The millions of people who supported Trump but did not attack the capitol need to be listened to and heard; something President-elect Biden seems to grasp.

The people who caused so much death and damage should, of course, be arrested and punished.

They are not getting the hero’s welcome they anticipated. There are hard and disappointing days ahead for many of them. That is a kind of justice.

All over the country, police agencies and private citizens are identifying the people in those photos.

But what about Trump? What is justice for him? Impeachment? Removal? Resignation?

It doesn’t make much sense, justice wise, to look the other way. In the Gulag Archipelago, Nobel Laureate Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn wrote this about evil and justice:

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

It seems to me that the foundations of justice have been ripped from right out under us by men and women who are, as they were in Berlin, silent about the evil we saw for much of the past for years.  We call them enablers. Some are calling them traitors.

That foundation has to be rebuilt slowly, mercifully, and with respect. Hardly any of us are blameless for what happened; so many of us, myself included,  contributed through our laziness, smugness, silence, or disinterest.

So what is justice here?

To me, it is forcing our President to resign from his office before he can do more damage or slide away from accountability and hide behind tomorrow’s lies. We are fickle people, we tend to forget.

And it isn’t time for another trial and congressional debate.

Failing Trump’s resignation, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are correct to impeach him for these crimes, and for officer Hickman and the others who died last Wednesday, and for the foundations of justice beneath the next generation.

At least history will remember what happened here, even if he is acquitted. Justice isn’t about certain success, it’s about right and wrong.

Rats and roaches live by competition and conflict under the laws of supply and demand,” wrote Wendell Berry. “It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

In 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to George Robertson of Lexington, Kentucky. “Our political problem now,” he wrote, is “Can we as a nation continue together permanently – forever half slave and half free?”

Our question is different but just as important. Our political problem now is can we, as a nation, continue together permanently – forever half truth and half lies.”

I mean to sign up in this struggle, I want to be a warrior for truth, seeking to practice honesty and generosity every day in every way. I can’t control what other people do, but I can control what I do.

Trump is already gone, in one way. Almost no honest or rational person can believe a word of what he says or justify what he has done. He is, as Don Corleone said, dead to me.

Gandhi said it is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts. There must be consequences for what he has done.

When we fail to set standards for justice and boundaries for behavior and hold people accountable, we feel angry and cheated and mistreated.

This is so often why we attack one another, which we are learning, is far more hurtful and dangerous than forcefully and bravely addressing a wrong.