1/ Have been thinking about how completely taken aback I was by the Capitol invasion: my dad had been convinced that it was a real possibility and I had thought that that was just absolute fantasy, excessive MSNBC watching hysteria.

2/ Lessons: SOMETIMES DADS ARE RIGHT and also I think that on some basic level I have still been in the zone of "history is over now and nothing can get too different, the only thing that is really a danger is More of the Same of increasing alienation & loneliness & immiseration

3/ & unfulfilling jobs with non-family wages & disembodiment & pod-living & corporate feudalism and the death of all local cultures except for McDonalds and Amazon sprawl-world & misc other Brave New World stuff"

4/ And I still think that those are real dangers and that fighting for real human lives, for real friendships and real families and good real and affordable places to live, are fights we need to focus on.

5/ And at the same time, it's important to realize that Big Actual Dramatic Bad Things can happen too. A pandemic, for one. A half-cocked invasion of the capitol by people who seriously memed themselves into a millenarian frenzy, for another.

6/ That means that we are less safe from Very Bad Things but also that Very Good Things can also happen, and above all it means that we need to take history and what might happen and what our role in it is *seriously.* This is not a joke or practice.

7/ Big bad things can happen, and often they can happen through lack of a sense of reality, of lack of a sense of our own power to do bad or good. Big good things can happen too. And I think those can happen, probably, when we *do* take our own power and responsibility seriously.

8/ And part of taking that seriously is taking Jesus seriously as our actual king. Deadly seriously. Because he is not kidding either. And that means living in his kingdom as his subjects and family FOR REAL, and facing up everything that means.