neotoma

I saw 4 older white men in red MAGA hats this morning at about 7:15 am while I was getting on the Metro. They were buying Metro cards and needed a Metro employee to explain how to them. None of them were wearing masks and one of them was carrying a length of rope.

When I got off Metro at 7:30 at Rockville, there were about a dozen people buying Metro cards, again mostly older and white, again not wearing masks, and again needing a Metro employee to guide them. I felt bad for the employees, because they have difficult jobs already and a bunch of people demanding service while not obeying the rules about maskwearing is just more grief.

I saw these two groups and was mildly concerned about getting home, because lost, aggressive right-wing protestors are something to be avoided. My commute currently routes home all the way from one end of the Red Line to the other, as it's easier to avoid people on Metro cars than on Metrobuses; I didn't want to take that route home because I didn't know when the Trumpist rally was going to break up and I didn't want to encounter them.

But that all changed when the news broke that the Trumpists had broken into the Capitol. When the news popped up on my phone, my manager sent me home early so that I could make sure to get home before something even more crazy happened.

There was a knot of about 20 Trump rally goers standing like lost sheep at Rockville when I got there -- not only did one of them have a partially rolled up Trump flag, but the majority of them were wearing hunter's orange, either knit caps or hunter's vests. Normally, I'm happy to help lost tourists, but these people I was leaving on their own -- standing in a clump, not in a bus bay or a taxi stop, so who knows what they were waiting for, but whatever it was they weren't in the right place for it.

I took the bus all the way to Wheaton, and then hopped on that to get home. The Metro car smelled like sulfur, which was worrying, but I made it home safe and just get to wait to see what will happen tomorrow.

Topeka, Kansas has repealed the local domestic violence law -- the city council and mayor claim that it would be better for the state and county courts to handle those cases, instead of Topeka prosecuting them (where domestic battery is only a misdemeanor?!).

So they repealed the local domestic violence law for purely budgetary reasons? :Gah: