Forum Replies Created
-
Rep. Andy Kim cleaning up at midnight after riots
âItâs a room that I love so much. … It pained me so much to see it in this kind of condition,â the New Jersey Democrat said.Unlike many of his congressional colleagues, Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J., was in his office in a separate federal building when President Donald Trumpâs supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday afternoon. So he didnât actually see the damage live until nearly midnight, after the House had voted down the last challenge to the presidential election result.
When he finally did walk around the rotunda â his favorite and arguably the most storied room of the building â the disarray left him speechless. Water bottles, broken furniture, tattered Trump flags and pieces of body armor and clothing were strewn on the marble floor as if it were an abandoned parking lot.
âItâs a room that I love so much â itâs the heart of the Capitol, literally the heart of this country. It pained me so much to see it in this kind of condition.â
âI was just overwhelmed with emotion,â Kim, 38, told NBC Asian America. âItâs a room that I love so much â itâs the heart of the Capitol, literally the heart of this country. It pained me so much to see it in this kind of condition.â
So for the next hour and a half, he crouched down and filled a half dozen trash bags with debris. When he finished cleaning up the rotunda, he began working on the adjacent rooms, including the National Statuary Hall and the Capitol crypt downstairs.
Then he returned to the House floor to debate Pennsylvania’s vote count, a session that lasted until 3 a.m. By Thursday evening, heâd been awake for more than 36 hours.
On a day in which video of mayhem and bloodshed inundated social media, a widely shared photograph of Kim, alone on his knees, picking up the final pieces of garbage in a nearly empty rotunda, was a radical break from â and rejection of â the violent impulses that drove the country to the brink of collapse. Many people labeled him a âtrue patriot.â While Kim said he didnât dwell much on the symbolic heft of his actions, the term was on his mind.
âI feel blessed to have this opportunity as a son of immigrants to be able to serve in Congress,â he said. âDemocracy to me is this place of opportunity that is affording me a chance to do something extraordinary.â
In 2018, Kim became the first Asian American to represent New Jersey in Congress, flipping a predominantly white district that voted for Trump in 2016 and did so again in 2020. (Kim won re-election in November despite voting to impeach the president last year.)
The irony of a history-making Korean American lawmaker dusting up after a white supremacist riot is not lost on Kim. But he also pointed to the progress thatâs been made.
âI represent a district where the vast majority of people do not look like me,â he said. âBut theyâve voted for me twice now to be their representative, and thatâs a beautiful thing. There are others who seek to make me seem like an ‘other’ whether itâs because of skin color, or gender, or sexuality. But thatâs not what this is about. Weâre all Americans.â
A former national security aide under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Kim recently spoke about how simmering ideological tensions can become dangerous during presidential transitions. But while he expected the hate and anger that defined the Trump era to escalate in the aftermath of the election, Wednesdayâs events still shocked him. In the roughly six hours he spent sheltered in his office, he worried about the safety of his colleagues and staffers as the pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol.
At one point, he recalled receiving a security alert that Capitol police had lost control of the building.
âIâve spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iâve been in war zones where Iâve had to shelter in place, but I never would have imagined that this would happen here,â he said, noting that he didnât know at the time whether the rioters were armed. âIt was a terrifying experience.â
Bridging the deep racial and ideological chasms in this country, Kim said, will require legislative action to rein in the radicalization of white supremacists and the proliferation of disinformation.
At the same time, he said, there must also be profound shifts in the way Americans treat one another on a personal level.
âThe depth of the divisions that we have isnât something any single law can wipe off the face of our planet,â he said. âWe also need to recognize that how we get through that is by seeing the humanity in each other. There are ways we can have debates and disagreements but not resort to violence.â
Why do I need to âreadâ about anarchism when I see with my own eyes groups of people breaking into the US Capitol looking for senators with a noose, and cop ties, shouting the election has been stolen and trying to overturn the results-in the name of overthrowing the existing authority. If that isnât anarchy then who cares.
Because Anarchy is actually a theory, one that disapproves of concentrated power.
Concentrated power responded to that philosophical threat to its existence by deliberately portraying Anarchy as chaos.
Now people think anarchy and chaos are synonyms. But they arenât. So thatâs why.
.Yeah, W, there’s 2 versions of the word.
Just putting things in black and white.
Philosophical anarchism is a 19th and 20th century political vision which argues that hierarchical social structures corrupt humanity. Here’s an example of that tradition and its way of thinking from Chomsky: âpower that isnât really justified by the will of the governed should be dismantled.â â Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism
In the popular everyday use of the word is, as you say Z, it just means chaos.
In a leftist context, W, since we’re aware of philosophical anarchism we tend not to use the word in the popular, everyday sense.
