Three years ago, I was driving down I-95 en route to Boston when I heard something on the radio that almost made me swerve off the road.“They have breached the Capitol,“ said an NPR announcer.

I had not been paying much attention to the radio. It was on for the music. My mind was on my mission, delivering my bride to Dana-Farber for treatments we hoped would save or extend her life. 

When we reached the hotel, I asked the clerk what was going on and he pointed to the TV set and said: “I don’t know. This is America. This kind of stuff is not supposed to happen here.”

A Colorado court ruled the Jan. 6 event was an insurrection and the Constitution’s 14th amendment (look it up) says anyone who participates in an insurrection can’t hold public office. Thus, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled the leading GOP presidential candidate cannot be listed on that state’s election ballot.

Today, we are witnessing a chapter in American history like none other. The U.S. Supreme Court is pondering a decision that may remove the leading GOP candidate for president from the primary ballot. While the court set a briefing schedule for lawyers leading up to oral arguments on Feb. 8, you can bet the nine judges and their law clerks are burning the midnight oil trying to understand why the 14th Amendment, written in the wake of the Civil War, applies to the 2024 Presidential Election.

Your newspaper, news feeds and TV are filled with “experts” opining on the case. On Fox, a smiling lawyer said it is a slam dunk for the GOP candidate. On MSNBC you get the opposite take. Any of them could be right, or wrong. There is no precedent to follow, and pundits, trying to court their supposed audience, will say just about anything to keep you tuned to their channel. And on the various internet sites, you get more radical and reactionary opinions. Some may have been generated by artificial intelligence that may sound good, but have no basis in fact. Welcome to the brave new world.

Of the Supreme Court’s nine members, six were appointed by Republican presidents, three by Democrats. Do you think that automatically means they will vote for the side that hired them?      

In any case, none of the pundits, including me, matter. The court will have the last word.

In any event, all this legal stuff is way above my pay grade. And no one cares what a fat, balding Old Scribbler thinks anyway. Truth be told, my addled elderly brain still can’t figure out baseball’s infield fly rule or the proper response to the Atwood club bid at the bridge table.

The only thing I can remember about Jan. 6, 2021 is the bravery of the cops defending the hallowed halls of the nation’s capitol and how their heroic restraint and professionalism kept them from pulling out their guns and opening fire. In most nations, an event like this would have become a massacre. 

Only the nine judges have votes. No matter what they decide, half the nation will be disappointed..

Meanwhile, our TV sets showed us a major miracle last week as we watched film of a giant airplane burst into flames and skid down a Tokyo airport runway. It looked like we were witnessing a terrible event. But somehow all 379 passengers and crew escaped.

When we travel by air, at the beginning of each flight, flight attendants recite a familiar mantra, telling us how to use the seat belts, oxygen masks and seat cushions and the location of the emergency exits.  Most of us have been passengers on airliners, and we all know it is a goat rope when people try to rush out of the plane the minute the wheels hit the runway. Elbows fly as people hurry to grab their bags from the overhead compartments, lug them into the narrow aisle, and squirm down the passageway.

The flight crew instructs us that, if there is an emergency, we are to leave our carry-on bags and follow the directions of the crew. This makes sense to me as I know what is in my carry-on bag and I wouldn’t mind replacing my old underwear and socks anyway.

In the Tokyo case, despite the flames, the passengers took just 10 minutes or so to jump down the exits and run from the flames.

I don’t know about you, but I expect I will pay more attention to the flight attendants’ instructions in the future.

Again, because of the flight crew’s restraint and professionalism, they saved 379 lives. 

Like the miracle on New York City’s Hudson River, where an airliner landed in the water and all survived, the Tokyo tarmac crash gave us a well needed shot of good news evolve from what could have been a terrible tragedy.