A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbleached in today's episode of the show, if you prefer a bleeped version, you can find that at our website. This American Life, dawg.

There was this article that a comedy website put out last year. Do you see this one is in cities first started going into lockdown. Everyone said nations, dogs f ing loving whatever is going on right now. Apparently, there wasn't every dog, Warren's dog, Rafie, 50 pound boxer mix was kind of vigilent, super protective dog even before the pandemic.

And then once Lockton started, the problem was like everyone was ordering stuff online and there were a million delivery people coming.

There was, you know, FedEx, UPS, USPS, Amazon, like all day long or, you know, my neighbors would be coming and going. And the minute the I couldn't even hear a delivery truck coming up the street.

And already the dog jumped on a chair that was near my window, was peering out just fully at attention. Ears perked up. That's when I started to see his anxiety amped up. Right. He couldn't get any rest. He couldn't calm down in the house.

He was always barking and growling and couldn't settle down. The fact that Lauren was now home all day with him, lots of dogs would have been the greatest thing that ever happened to them. Parafield just made things a lot worse.

Dogs like him, they need a break, right? They need a break from the vigilance to say I don't need to guard this person anymore. This person's out of the house. I'm chill. They need to not be on the job all the time. And I think that he was on the job all the time and that was the problem.

She took him to a behavioral veterinarian who told her that lots of dogs were going through this since the pandemic put Rafi on meds, meat flavored Prozac. It didn't fix the problem. He got worse and worse on walks. He was suspicious of people which had never been before. He ran across the room and burst through the door to chase and bite a FedEx delivery man. He lunged at someone on the stairs of the building. Lauren set up an appointment with a trainer who specialized in aggressive dogs.

And finally, Rafie attacked a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old, just burst through a large gated community garden where dogs run off leash. Ryan was guarding the door to make sure nobody entered while Rafie was in there, but he rushed past her to get to the girl breaking through the gate and the girl fell down.

And the dog. Just got on top of her. Oh, my God, so terrifying. I mean, the dog probably weighed almost as much as the girl did. And I mean, my I was just devastated for the girl. The girl was upset and crying, walked away, limping, Ahrons, an experienced dog person, she walked with three different trainers when she first got Rafi to deal with his aggressiveness towards other dogs. But the fact that these attacks since the pandemic were completely unprovoked and on people, the fact that the meds weren't working, the RAFIE seem perpetually agitated and just changed.

She thought about putting him down. She had no choice.

And, you know, I wrestled with those things. And it's an excruciating decision to make. I've had dogs before that you've had I've had to euthanize because they are older, they're sick, and you're putting them out of their misery. And this is a totally different experience because you're taking a perfectly healthy being that loves you more than anything that would do anything for you. Well, yeah. And in fact, is trying to protect you. Right. Right.

And trusts you.

But a completely unprovoked attack like that, there's there's there's nothing you can say about it. There's no there's no way you can reason yourself. Out of what has to happen next, if you go after a kid like you're done, you know, she decided to put Rafie down. It's truly the most heartbreaking decision I've I've ever had to make in my life.

It's the anniversary of the first covid case in the United States, when you first heard of covid, could you have imagined that it would touch you in this particular way that you'd end up not having your dog?

There is no world in which I would think that this would be the logical outcome of covid that I would have to put my dog down, that covid would ever have any impact on my dog. I mean, that you'd of all of the possible probable outcomes of a global pandemic. My dog dying is not one that I could have ever imagined. There are certain consequences of the pandemic that we all know, over 400000 Americans dead, millions people out of work, kids everywhere having these terrible school years with distant learning.

But there are all these other ways the virus is altered and shaped our lives. I was talking to this woman, Cindy, in Lincoln, Nebraska, about this thing. It happened a few days after her dad died of covid, just watching her minivan into the garage and realized. Oh, right. My dad isn't going to teach my son to drive. I think it was I was just parking. I think I was parking my own car and, you know, putting my hands on the keys and just thinking, oh, wait.

That that's another thing that we're going to miss now, Hassan Harris and her dad were really close and she felt good knowing their dad was going to teach him to drive. Just Harrison's really smart and funny, but not everybody gets him.

And he and my dad really got each other and they could just, like, hang out, make funny jokes, ask questions, quiz each other. As a matter of fact, I was just looking to have a there's a toy plastic soldier sitting at my desk. My dad had open heart surgery.

Harrison brought a few of these little plastic green soldiers to his hospital room and said, these will protect you while you're in the hospital, Grandpa.

And so my dad started staging like battle scenes from his hospital bed and there was candy and Kleenex. And then he would text them photos to my son and say, hey, Harrison, look, here's you know, anyway, that's the kind of things that they would just do with each other anyway, driving that huge thing, just a small specific cost.

Harrison, 16th birthday. You know, the birthday and you can get a driver's license, which is a few weeks after her dad died. So who's going to teach him now? I don't know. We'll have to. I suppose we'll take turns.

My husband and I. Yeah, we haven't talked about it anymore, though. I think we know we all kind of know it's hanging there and in some ways.

Not moving on with it may be his way of still kind of that magical thinking of. We don't have to think about it another way, even though we all know that's the reality, he said this one thing to me that really caught me by surprise. We're talking about how since her dad died, she's connected to this whole community of people online who've lost family members to covid.

And I asked her, like what people have said that's been helpful, expecting me to say, you know, it's been comforting to talk to people who have been through what you've been through, that kind of thing.

But the most important thing she's gotten from it, I think some validation in the anger. You know, when you're surrounded by still some denial people that the disease isn't that serious. Yeah. Or that masks don't really work.

After your father got sick and he says car dealership where he worked on that, one of his co-workers tested positive eight days before. So you're angry at his employers? Oh, absolutely. And then you're angry at the government in general, the way it was handled. The fact that we still have a functioning television in our house is probably a miracle, because the number of times that I was ready to throw something when the occupant of the White House would talk about how this is no big deal, it's going to go away because we clearly knew that that wasn't true.

And after my dad got sick and then died, I was just so angry. So we we knew what we needed to do. We could have done something in this country. Have you heard Joe Biden talk about the empty chair? Yeah, it was actually the final debate.

My dad died of death is October 20th, and the last debate was October 22nd.

And I had heard that line. I've heard him use it before. And I. I know, you know, that's a part of kind of like one of the things maybe from like the stump speech sort of thing. Right. Right.

It's one of those things he said a million times. Right. He said it a million times. And then I'm sitting on the couch.

And he looks at the camera and he talks about it again after my dad died and truly felt like, oh, right, this is me now.

This is my Thanksgiving, this is my Christmas. This is my son's 16th birthday. And somehow, even though I knew he had said that line hundreds of times before. I felt like he was looking through the television straight at me. I felt like he was looking at our whole family and I felt like he was looking at all of us all the other. At the time, it was only like two hundred thousand families.

Just three months later, of course, the numbers doubled.

It's such a simple thing to acknowledge the loss that's all around us today on our program with the new president in office one year after the first coronavirus case was found in the United States, it was in Seattle January 21st of last year. There are stories about some of the things that have been lost this past year, things we do not usually think about as part of that empty chair.

NBC, Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us. Equine cops and robbers.

So what do you say exactly about what was lost two weeks ago on January six when rioters stormed the Capitol building, when reporter Emmanuel Felton Rochat Day at of all the footage he saw, one video stood out to him. You might have seen this one piece of a single black officer. We'd all later find his name, Eugene Goodman. And in the video, he's backing up a staircase, holding off a mob of rioters with a tiny telescoping baton like.

They gave Emanuel the idea he wanted to hear what the day was like for black Capitol Police officers who faced off with this mostly white mob, a mob that showed up to the Capitol with Confederate flags and other symbols of white supremacy. What did they think about what happened eventually?

Got a few of these officers on the phone and they shared an insider account that is really unlike anything we've heard from the Capitol so far.

Some of their experience, of course, was the same as white officers.

But as you hear, some of it was very different.

Emanuel put together this next story from an interview with one of those black officers, the Capitol Police officers. Their job is to protect Capitol grounds and members of Congress because they're not allowed to talk to the press. We need to disguise this officer's identity. And so we had an actor copy his voice as closely as possible, have a quick warning. Also, this story contains a racial slur.

Here's Emanuel, the officer who I'm calling. Officer Jones was the person almost everyone told me I just had to talk to you. Jones is warm and outgoing is how at one point he told me his love language is words of affirmation. He has a lot of feelings about his job. I talked to him on Friday, just two days after the attack. He was a little stunned, still processing everything that had happened in nursing some injuries, just scrapes, cuts, bruises, bloody knuckles.

I got me some work, and I tell you that I did see two dead bodies, three if you include my co-worker. But he wasn't dead at the time. I've never been in a war. I'm not I'm not a veteran, but I can imagine that's what the fuck war looks like. Yeah, I can imagine that.

So but they hadn't started that way at all. That morning. He was posted on the east side of the Capitol Building.

A friend of mine squeezed out of me an Instagram story. They were breaching the Capitol today.

Guys, I hope you already Officer Jones thinks it was from the Bra Boys. And I'm like, wait, what? Yeah, I was like I laughed at it. And I was like, please, I'm coming in here. Everybody say that. Of course, we know by now that's exactly what happened not long after one, he says people were coming from everywhere.

And then over the radio, they called out that they breach the first fence line of security. It was like, wait a minute, this guy, guys, this this is going to get real.

He raced over to the west side of the Capitol, the side that faces the Mall, where the stage was set up for the inauguration and joined the police line as they tried to beat back the crowd with their fists and batons, pepper spraying them and yelling, get back, get back. Have you ever been in a fight like that?

No, not like that. No way. These people were out of range and they were determined to play video games before, you know, zombie games, resident evil of. And the zombies are just coming after you and you just out there. I guess that's what I call related to a call of duty zombies. And the further you go, the more and more zombies just come in. You're just running and running, running. And they wouldn't stop like you're seeing they're getting their heads cracked with these batons and we're spraying them and they don't care.

It was insane once the writers broke into the capital around to Officer Jones, crushed inside to try and help out. He wasn't following any instructions because there weren't any.

He realized that as he listened into his radio, the department was attempting to come up with a plan and attempted to come up with the plan because that was that was said on the radio.

We need to come up with a plan. Well, I was thinking to myself, what? Why don't we have one already?

So the officers came up with their own strategy. They linked up in teams of two and ran around the building responding to distress calls, coming in over the radio priority calls, which meant everyone stop and listen. They were pouring in.

So when you used to hear in priority, maybe once every two or three days and you're hearing it once every 30 seconds, priority, we have an officer down priority. We have an officer trapped, surrounded by protesters priority. We have a person having a medical emergency. We need these fires at this location priority. They just breach the windows priority. They're breaking the glass priority. They're headed up to the House chamber priority. Shots fired.

And you're thinking, what in the hell is happening?

While responding to these distress calls, Officer Jones got into some really surprising and intense conversations with the rioters, like when he and his partner were responding to a call for help from a fellow officer and ran into a crowd of 30 or 40 rioters headed straight for an area full of injured cops.

I sent the guy I was with. I told him to go ahead and respond to the other call and I'll stand here and I'll hold this hallway. And I took them all by myself. Yeah, I made an impassioned plea to them. I said I said, listen, you have the nerve to be holding a blue lives matter of flag and you are out there. Fucking us up. Please go home. You don't care about us. How can you care about us?

And you're doing this to us. We got dozens of cops incapacitated and hurt now. And when I said that a lot of them stop and pause, I was like, wait, y'all got cops down, how many cops are down? And they look like they had a moment of like, holy fuck. And then they step back out of it. And it was like, hey, guys, man, we're doing this for you. And then one of the guys, it was a group of like seven people walked by to them and then back say, hey, listen, man, I know what you're going through.

And he pulled out his badge, a police badge, and the other guy had his badge. I was like, wait, you got to be kidding. And I wanted to go up and snatch. Yeah, I want to find out who the fuck they were. Yeah. And me, I'm the only black tomstad in front of them. Yeah.

So what did they do? They looked at me, they yelled at me, they're yelling at me, and I would not let them go past, do I want to go past me? I'm going to be all your asses one by one with all your. Come on. And that's when I saw one of the guys who that was a cop said, hey, man, we're going to stand here with you. I was like, no, get the fuck out of my building is like, this is our building.

And I was like, this is my God damn building. I'm in charge. You get the fuck out. And that's when I started losing my temper even more. I mean, I got tears streaming down my face. Later that day, when he was even more drained, he had another confrontation, this one about politics. It happened near the rotunda when Officer Jones was trying to protect the critical hallway. There was something like 70 of them this time, the attackers he was facing off with started justifying what they were doing.

Listen, they told him we can't let them overtake our democracy. We're stopping the steel man.

Then I started I actually I got into a conversation I didn't get because I wanted to fucking engage him. And a guy was telling me I was like, yeah, I voted for Joe Biden. So the fuck what? I was like, what do I not matter? Am I a liar? I voted for Joe Biden. So what? So the fuck what? So tell me. I don't fucking matter. Yes, I was like, what? Well, I don't agree with you.

I don't agree with you. I don't what? You're going to kill me. I think that so much of Trump and his supporters, anger and inability to accept their loss in the 2012 election boils down to the idea that black folks just shouldn't count. The president has continuously attacked black voters. He has claim that there was widespread fraud in a number of cities with large black populations, cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia. And he has demanded that thousands of votes be thrown out because of it.

But this crowd was a lot more direct.

They were liden into me. Oh, this nigga voted for Joe Biden and he yelled it to his crowd, the crowd, and they booed.

Eventually, reinforcements from other police departments arrive to help clear out the building. It was a little before 5:00 when things finally calmed down enough that officers were told to take a few seconds to send an email text to loved ones. When Jones looked on his phone, he had something like 70 text messages and over 30 missed calls. Not long after that, he finally got a chance to sit down, catch his breath and take it all in.

I don't even think about race until we got everybody out.

And I sat down with one of my buddies and tears just started streaming down my face. You know, now, obviously, all the commotion is ended. So it's just law enforcement in there and FBI suits and all these suits walk around everybody, but, you know, the important people. So it was all the fucking messes done. Right. And I'm just sitting there covered in fucking tear gas and sea spray. And I'm looking at my buddy. He put his arm around me, another black guy.

And I was like I was like, you could also look, look, look, look. I was like, look at him. Look at him. They're just sitting there smiling, sitting there and shaking each other.

He means the FBI guys and other law enforcement.

What the fuck are you smiling about? What the fuck are you smiling about? And I'm like, furious. And that was like and that's when I said, I'm so sick and tired of the shit. Is this racist as terrorists? And I'm screaming, I'm now I'm in the rotunda and it echoes. So it was loud as shit. Everybody like stopped and they turned around and looked at me and I was like, what the fuck you are looking at?

Yeah, nobody should be OK. You know, we just thought the five fucking hours with some fucking racist terrorist. I think I called a nigger fifteen times, man, you know.

Fuck, yes. I'm trying to imagine as a black man, I like what it was like having the N-word hurled at you, seeing that kind of ugly racism.

It broke my heart. Like I said, that's why I had my breakdown in the rotunda. And I just sat there and I cried. I cried. I cried for about 15 minutes and I just let it out. I was done, I was mentally exhausted, I was physically exhausted, and I didn't have anything left to give and it just hurts so much. And I looked at my body and I remember I said, is this fucking America? Yo, you know, what are we doing?

I was like, what is happening? I've been thinking a lot about what Jan says about America when I think about that day, I remember the photos I saw early that morning of blackpoll workers in Georgia bravely counting the runoff ballots in the middle of a pandemic and under threat from Trump supporters. How that afternoon, I saw video of a black officer, Eugene Goodman, protecting Mike Pence and lawmakers from the insurrectionists. And later that night, watching a video of black Capitol staff cleaning up the mess, the writers laugh through all the attacks.

Everywhere I looked, it was black people doing the job of making our democracy work. It was a job Officer Jones continued to do the day after the attack. He went straight back to work with continuing threats. The Capitol Police have had to work around the clock. 16 hour days have become the norm. He's had just one day off in the two weeks between January 6th and inauguration. I talked to him a few days before. So however you're back at work now, what does it feel like to be at the Capitol today?

You look around and you see all these soldiers here, you look around, you see unscalable razor wire fences around here, and as an officer who got his ass worth a couple of days ago. If you could. Hell, yeah, come back, try it again. We got help now. Try it again. So as an officer, my dear. But that's just a person, American citizen, black man. You feel like. What the hell is this normal now?

Is this the No. Is this what we got to do to prevent this from happening?

It is mad if you think there's a long list somewhere of things we thought could never happen. And so many of them have been laws struck off the list disappeared in the last year. This was just the latest one. In my conversations with the officers, it felt like we were saying, sure, there are a lot of racist in America, but this that they could storm the Capitol, that they could shut down our government. That left us. And that was near.

Daniel Felton, he writes about race and inequality for BuzzFeed News. He checked in with Officer Jones on Inauguration Day this week after Jones said he was glad they were going to inaugurate the president that the rioters did not want to see inaugurated in public in their faces, he said. But when the actual day came, he did not get to enjoy it himself. He didn't see any of the speeches or the performances. He was working on the east side of the building.

Far from the action, the actor whose voice you heard saying Officer Jones's words is Bengochea Nabay.

You can see many upcoming Hulu series, The Old Man with Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow.

Coming up, we share something with you that you need that is missing from your life, that you may not even have noticed how much you need this. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Support for this American life comes from Wonderings new true crime podcast, The Apology Line. The story begins with Alan Bridge posting flyers around New York City asking people to anonymously call a confessional line and apologize for their crimes. Within hours, the calls start coming in, people apologizing for stealing infidelity, even murder. But one caller stood out Richi. His calls left thousands wondering if he really was a serial killer. That is, until Ritchey offered to provide proof of his crimes.

Subscribe to Wonderings, the apology line on Apple podcasts. It's this American Life, IRA Glass, today's program, The Empty Chair. We have stories about things that have been lost this past year, things that seemed worth noting as we head into whatever new chapter is going to unfold this year.

We've arrived at Act two of our program, Act two, Fifty Shades of Shade. So here is something else that we have all lost since the pandemic. So it almost feels too small to mention. But but really I think is pretty significant. Rachel Connolly noticed this. She's a writer in London.

Our producer Louis Sullivan talked to her to understand why this thing, Rachel's missing matters so much. Let's start with a little story about two brothers.

OK, so we just call them Frank and Steven. They're slightly different ages. Frank is the older brother and he's kind of shorter, less, less handsome, Steven, because handsome brother. But Frank is kind of more gregarious and charming in this kind of really funny guy. So they both are kind of attractive in different ways.

This happened at the beginning of the pandemic.

The brothers had moved back to their hometown for lockdown and a kind of surreal second adolescence, back with their parents social distance hanging with people they'd kind of known in high school. Frank and Steven, not their real names are in their early 20s. They'd spent the day drinking outside with someone they'd grown up with, and she used cold baths.

And Frank, the less handsome but funny one, he's always had a big bath. And he's kind of like, you know what, I've been meaning to do this for years. This night is going to be our night. And he said this to Stephen, like, you know, I think this this is going to be the night it happens as they were drinking all day. And Frank just got drunker and darker and darker. And because people do do that, like where they want to do something but don't want to kind of like be be responsible for doing it, they will.

So he goes by the end of the day, I took McMaster's slurring his words, like, just tell him the same story over and over again.

And Steven was like, I'm just going to do the nice thing here and just bring bring me back Frank. Like, usually drunk doesn't look as Steven tells Beth, I'm going to be a good brother here. He takes Frank home and puts him to bed, which is all very charitable giving. But once he had done this, he then went back to house to go back as well, but can walk and guess what happens next.

Sex. Sex is what happened next between Beth and Steven, the younger brother, the more handsome but less funny brother who had not liked Beth since childhood. This is what we used to call gossip, so the conversation used to be before the pandemic took it away from us. I found Rachel because she wrote an essay about how she suddenly noticed its absence. She put her finger on this thing that I've been feeling, too. She wrote, this was the year when everything happened and nothing happened.

And I quickly got bored of talking about the news almost always bad or asking people what they'd been up to. Almost always nothing.

Just like Zim calls with the same people to have essentially the same conversation, which was like, what were you going to say? I was locked on months and then it would be like, So what's going on? And everyone will be like, nothing, actually. Really not really much on.

Oh, that's so true, though, that moment, if you like. So what's new? Nothing.

The thing about this story, Rachel doesn't even know these people yet, so not at all. No, she thinks she maybe met one of the brothers at a party once. She just heard the story from a friend of hers. He's the one who knows Frank and Stephen. The best kind of gossip, of course, is about people, you know, but she didn't have that and she was so hungry for it. It turns out in a pinch or in a pandemic, strangers will do.

You can't sleep with the person your brother likes you just like. Do you think it's so bad?

I'm not sure.

I, I kind of think it's one of those drunk things where it's like if someone someone's like from like a teenager, I'm like, do they even like them or is it just like is it just someone who's here and have always been there?

Like I said, yeah.

Rachel and I are both living without kids or extended family. We haven't lost our jobs. Neither we nor our loved ones got very sick. I recognize how dumb our concerns are compared to what so many people's lives have been. But we both noticed a thing that over the course of the pandemic had kind of drifted away while we weren't paying attention. The ability to socialize like a normal person talking, it turns out, is like a muscle. And when you don't use it much for months on end, it can atrophy.

Rachel remembers the first time she went out to meet up with more than one person. I was literally like the next day I felt like I run a marathon or like I've done this like extraordinary feats of endurance. And it was just like having a conversation with more than one person for a couple of hours.

It was like a job.

Like you have to really focus on what you're saying. You have to focus on your body language.

I felt this also, friends will get in touch and want to go for a walk. I'm like, that sounds awkward.

I'll see you after the pandemic. It's not that I don't want to see people. There's just no fuel for conversation stuff from before.

The pandemic is too old to talk about now. So what are you supposed to talk about when there are no situations?

So Rachel started doing this thing that I thought was pretty brilliant. She started asking people to gossip about anyone and it kind of worked.

Conversation was easier when you were talking about the tailor who lied about her husband's death to avoid an uncomfortable conversation about a missing shirt or the guy who'd hooked up with his roommate and it didn't work out. And should he move now?

I could talk your ear off about a friend of mine whose fiance broke up with her during couples therapy, remote couples therapy over Zoome. How my friend watched your fiance dump her from their laptop screen even though they were sitting side by side on their bed. This kind of talk, it wasn't exactly normal like before, but it was good enough.

Like pretty decent fake meat. Take that story about the two brothers, it delivers the thrill of being scandalized and that demented little bond you feel when you huddle up with someone and judge people together. Clearly, the younger brother Stephen was wrong, the handsome snake, but also both their brothers.

Did you really have to do that? But actually, hold that thought, there is more. And here's the rest of the story about Frank, the funny one.

He didn't know his brother had slept with Beth, and about a week later, he also sleeps with Beth, the crush he'd put dibs on back in like eighth grade. Didn't know he was really excited about it.

And the city with a group of friends a few days after, kind of know kind of boasting they were going to have a lockdown thing and that, you know, this has finally happened. And then one of these friends was like, oh, wait. But you know what, Stephen? I'm presuming you do. And Frank was like, what?

And then it was broken to him. But this also broken in front of a kind of group of people. And then he kind of had to go back and be like, I wasn't I wasn't serious about this.

I didn't mean we were going to have a lot of thing, which is it's always mortifying when you have been talking earnestly about something. And then it's revealed that you didn't have a piece of information that other people has lately.

Yeah, Frank called Beth and told her the whole lockdown thing was off.

He and his brother had a big falling out. And Beth was really sad because it turns out she actually liked Frank back the same way he liked her.

The thing with Steven was just a drunk hookup. Frank was the real thing. Oh, really?

She was like, we could have had a lockdown thing. Yeah. She was like, the lockdown thing is off the cards, but it shouldn't have been that shouldn't have been went. And I should have told him she was confiding all this in a friend who will call Sarah, who then goes off and sleeps with Frank, even though Beth had just told Sarah how much she liked him.

I like that everyone behaved as a human dolls, which is like everyone is tough in dresses. People do do things out of a vengeance and spite, but that is just normal behavior. It's part of life. And I think like when we were discussing different chapters of the story, one person would be totally appalled by the fact that someone would do something and I would do that.

I've kind of been dreading this interview, just like I dread talking to anyone these days. My social skills are rusty and worried that we'd run out of things to talk about. I had actually postponed our call for a week because of that, but it's really fun to talk with you about this and I'm like, oh my God, I'm totally paying attention. I'm following everything she's saying.

I'm relating I'm operating successfully as a human. Yeah, that was a joke. I understood that it's a joke. And I told my joke Receptos.

That was very funny and I enjoyed.

I did enjoy it. I realized it's one of the most fun conversations I've had in months. It's not about shit talking people, it's about the shit talking itself and the fact that we're doing it together.

I haven't even told you the last part of the story that's matter, her friend Sarah for sleeping with the guy she liked. So she tells this other friend, Sarah's a slut. And then that other friend turns around and tells Sarah, that's called you a slut.

You know, this like peripheral friends, like. Well, I know.

Become part of this show.

Is she completely inserted herself into this thing? Actually, to me, this is the worst is like inserting yourself. It does with no other.

You even sleep with anyone. She just was like, I had to tell her that. But, you know, when people finish, they always do something like this. Everybody knows they're always like I was simply pelchat.

My principles compelled me to write the information.

It was stupid.

I wouldn't I wouldn't say anything, but I felt I had to. It's true. I could actually see myself being a snitch in that situation.

She had the right to know it was her right. I could see myself doing that, just inserting myself like the worst character in it to win.

I have no stakes in it, just needing to be that, which is quite a controversial thing, because the minute I heard that, I was like, how could she didn't? Or just doing that, like being that person, like other people were like, it's it's about, ah, you're the snitch.

OK, so that's the end to who's right and who's wrong. Do we care?

We do. Julie Sullivan is a producer on our show for more gossip and thoughts about gossip, you can find Rachel Conaway's essay that inspired this story. And Haslet, that's where it first came out. Just pretty delightful. It is called The Year in Gossip.

Actually, there's a German word for that, so I thing that we've lost this past year is something big, something we all took for granted, I think something kind of frightening in its implications.

And that's the idea that we could come out of a national election and agree that it was legit and agree on who won. You're either on one side of this or the other, either you think the man in the White House today won the election fair and square or you don't do stated clearly and unambiguously I and the producer of this radio program side with all the people out there who do not think the election was stolen, including apparently now former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said the people who believe otherwise were fed lies.

But right now, millions of people believe that the wrong guy is in the White House. A third of all voters believe there was widespread fraud, which is remarkable, right? Back in November, journalists in Germany, Johan Bittner, was watching this unfold, seeing the fake evidence that was showing up under the hashtag Stop the Steel, reading the president's tweets about supposedly election fraud.

And for some reason, what sprang to my mind was then the memory of the toy stores or the step in the back with the stab in the back myth that I learned about it in school.

More or less every German would know the stuff in the back because it was such a potent lie in German history.

Stop. The deal is about losing an election. The stab in the back myth is about losing an entire war, namely World War One. But there are parallels between the two eyes and the way they took hold that are unsettling. The history goes like this. Basically, there came a point in 1918 the United States had entered the war.

Germany suffered defeats, was clear to everybody that Germany was going to lose. In fact, Navy sailors refused to head out to be killed in what they saw as suicide missions in a war that was doomed within Germany. Lots of the population was against it. And so in 1918, the Germans surrendered. The German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm, the second abdicated the throne, fled the country. Germany became a democracy for the first time, but right away, starting in 1918, coincidentally, also a global pandemic going on right then the 1918 flu, 50 million died.

Right then, starting in 1918, right wing politicians and newspapers started pushing this lie, a kind of steady, angry drumbeat of coverage, saying that, in fact, they could have won the war if Jews and Social Democrats and leftists and the country in the back by forcing Germany to surrender.

Even the creators of the step to the beckwith's knew that they were lying. No, the likes of of deluded off who later supported the Nazis, they knew well that the war was lost was a lost cause.

So after this myth begins, one of the things that you write is that there was no national consensus on the reality on what had happened to them, and it became impossible for a democracy to continue.

Yes, that was quite true. And the disturbing effect of the step of the Beckman's was that it did not grow weaker but stronger over the years. You might have expected that eventually people will see the truth. They will acknowledge the facts, they will believe with journalists and observers and historians tell them. But the contrary is true. That's actually one of the big things that I took from an op ed that Johan wrote about all this back in November in The New York Times, that a guy like this might not die off on its own.

It very well might stick around and grow in power.

Throughout the 1920s, the idea that certain Germans were to blame for this defeat, for this big loss was very seductive and very attractive. And I would go so far to say that if it hadn't been for the step in the Beckwith's, the Nazis could have never been as successful as they were.

It was a central premise in Hitler's speeches and ideology. Now, to be clear, Johan Bittner is deeply aware of the differences between America today and Germany in the nineteen twenties.

He is not saying that we should expect the rise of a new Adolf Hitler or something like that, but he is saying that with 1920s Germany shows us is how effective and popular an alternate reality can be in a country that's deeply polarized.

The other point along these lines, it really has stayed with me and feels relevant to today in America is that back in the 20s, people who believe this myth saw their opponents as traitors, as people who had betrayed Germany in this basic, fundamental way, which then justified anything that was done against them.

So the actual accusation was that all the people responsible for the so-called step on the back were criminals. November, Fabrício, November criminals who signed the armistice in November 1918. So the idea was that they were the ones who obstructed the legitimate course of history.

Well, when you say that, it makes me think about the protesters at the capital who who feel like the election's been stolen. Like, of course, extreme measures are called for. An election has been stolen from them.

But this is an interesting mindset, isn't it? I mean, we know from people who are so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they believe that even violence is legitimate. To achieve their games is more or less a terrorist mindset or an extremist mindset, of course, they feel that they are the actual defenders of the true America. I mean, I read that Republicans who actually spoke out against Trump and against the Steele campaign, they now have to fear for their lives.

I saw that to the death threats against Republicans who voted to accept the election results. And back in the 20s in Germany, there was violence, starting with the German politician who negotiated their terms of surrender in World War One, he was murdered. A man named Matthias Ernsberger, one of his assassins from a first failed assassination attempt, went on trial and told the judge they did it because Etchberger stabbed the country in the back and the judge asked him where he got this idea.

He said the newspapers. So, yeah, President Biden's in office signing executive orders and talking about unity and trying to turn the page.

But a lie this big didn't was a war he didn't lose. An election can stick around and fester and grow.

It can lead to people losing faith in the entire system of government that Germany stop being a democracy by the 30s and it can lead to violence.

That for quarantining. So today's program is about losses that are unaccounted for.

And one of our producers, Chana Joffe Walt, has been thinking about the lives of kids during this pandemic.

You had to account for what they've lost.

One kid in particular, I saw him on Zoome last may have gotten an email asking me to show up for some online rallies, and he was at one of them. The rallies were for youth programs in New York City, programs that were being considered for budget cuts. My kids after school program was one of them.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the fund. You see virtual reality, man. How's everybody doing over here on your.

Stop doing while doing well.

It's so strange going back to this video now and seeing how psyched everyone is to be on Zoome together, there's families and staff from programs across the city and people are practically giddy to see the people we used to see in the world in here.

So let's do a selfie really quickly. If folks can just look at me. I'm going to take a picture and then we're going to post it on our social media. So are you ready?

I had forgotten this time back then, last May, we still believed we could get our lives back, stab people in this rally, say, well, obviously we're going to need somewhere to send our kids.

We can't just close all the places children go every day. I'm a single dad says innocently. Parents need to keep their jobs. There's a program director. His budget is about to be cut. And he's saying, but I mean, we can't lay off hundreds of people in the middle of a pandemic. Come on. This is a lot of what the meeting was. People talking about why their programs shouldn't be cut, especially parents and kids.

The kid who has stuck with me many months later is a little boy who spoke to sitting up straight and stiff in a blue collared shirt, clearly nervous.

Hi, everyone. My name is Joel Santana. And I just want to say that at first he caught my eye because he seemed so little.

I have most kids speaking with teenagers. He looks like it could be nine or ten. But when he spoke, it was clear he's older in middle school. He talks like a kid who wants to sound like an adult and is eager for his vocabulary to catch up.

During my time there, I got to know people and do engaging activities with them. And now I can call them my friends.

He's looking increasingly nervous, maybe trying not to cry. I can't tell.

You can. Program really helps people in a community that don't really have anywhere to go after school. You know, it helps. It really helps with the with with the community.

And sorry, one second he turns off his camera and we all just wait looking at his black square. Is he coming back? Twenty seconds pass, we love you, Joe. Well, it's a.. You got this joal love, you got this, he turns his camera back on and finishes.

I just wanted to say that and I just want to emphasize that it would be such a loss to have some sort of cut that would sort of prohibit or are like our growth in the community.

And it's so detrimental that you, like me, have growth again. It would be such a loss to many kids.

Thank you for thinking about what's been lost in this past year. I've wondered about Joel, how scared he seemed of losing his after school program, how scared he seemed in that moment. I wondered what was going on with him and if his program got cut and what that 20 second silence was about. Last week, I called him up, introduced myself and asked him, so what was happening when you turned your camera off?

I probably just like breathing in and out. Deep breath out because, like, it's definitely a hard topic to talk about. And, you know, this was something that was definitely a big chunk of my life. And then it was just, you know, taken away. Joel told me he wrote out what he planned to say at the rally in advance. He practiced his comments, practice them in different rooms and his apartment considered if he should print them.

No, he should hold them in his hand. No, he should put them to the side. Joel thought somehow if he said the right words in the exact right way, the program would come back.

It just felt so important that I made quite clear. I just think that doing this would basically ensure that I still have that part of my life. Joel wanted that was so committed to saving his after school program because there was a big thing that happened to him there, something that was really big to him and is also really small. His mom, Sarita Lopez Rodriguez, says you have to understand who Joel was before middle school. There's a reason Joel speaks like an adult.

He grew up around adults. It was always him and his mom when he was little. So he used to take him to night school. If she couldn't find childcare when she went to law school, they lived in the dorms together. So Joel spent a lot of time around adults, but with kids, he just could not connect. His mom tried sports programs. Joel was not a sports guy. She got him together with her friends, kids.

He'd hang on her leg and she thought maybe we need to move their Latino Cerita, that maybe somewhere more diverse.

Maybe he just needs to feel more included.

So right before middle school, they moved to Queens.

I try to find a part with, like the most kids right now, almost like he's going to have to play with somebody here, you know, and socialize here because like there were kids playing tag and I kept on some of that. Want to start. Right. Like one, you know, and they'll include you. They'll ask if you want to play. Right. He's like, no, like you have a bunch of kids just playing tag.

You know, we would be there like two hours and nothing. You know, he made the statement analysis like, OK, he goes, Mom, you don't understand the social aspect of being a kid. And I was like, OK, he said those words.

Yes, he literally said those words. And I was just like looking at him. I'm like. Then Joel started middle school, sorry to send him up for the after school program, and that's when something big happened for Joel.

He made a friend to actually and after school, James and Richard, and then walking home from after school. One day, Joel met a kid named Daniel who has become his best friend. Joel told me that could easily have never happened. The two of them crossing paths at the exact same time.

If he wouldn't want to see how hard it is, a little bit. The most part, it probably would have not had a chance to actually and, you know, have a friendship.

He says if Daniel went in just a millisecond sooner, they wouldn't have had a chance to meet and have a friendship. And what would that have meant for you?

I, I honestly I don't know really. Just in the sense of like having a best friend. And I just think that no, I had had that before. Like a friend would come over to my house and just play the little girl hang out.

Joel said, I'm an only child. This was huge for him. And after that, he threw himself into the world in a way he had never done before.

At lunchtime, he had a table of friends to sit with. He signed up for photography and after school he ran for president of the after school student council and he won. He saw a counselor one day playing with devil sticks, sort of like juggling.

And Joel begged his mom to get him some. Cerita told me he was obsessive about mastering it. It was the first time she'd seen him have a hobby. Joel was suddenly, enthusiastically responding to the people and opportunities and chance encounters around him.

He was mastering the social aspect of being a kid and then the middle of seventh grade with the pandemic after school shut down, it went before regular school closed and those first few weeks were jarring, getting home early, letting himself into the house.

And it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like normal. Would you do with your time? On. I don't think. I don't know what it was, it just felt blank. I just found myself either just lying down on my bed and just bored. It's just been overwhelming. Just boredom all the time.

That has not gone away. Joel's mom told me sometimes she still finds him lying on the bed, no phone or book, just staring at the ceiling right when his world should have been getting bigger. It's gotten so much smaller. He goes from his bedroom to the living room to the kitchen. He talks to his mom. I asked if he sees friends in online school. Joel said, yeah, that's not the same as if he calls his best friend, Daniel.

He says, yeah, again, nothing.

Yeah, I was just thinking, listening to you, I know there's a lot of concern about learning loss, like kids missing out on the things that you would normally learn in middle school, like developing your writing skills and learning algebra and geometry. Do you think there are things that are not accounted for on that list?

Some of my friends, honestly, I have lost connection with a lot of my friends because of this, and I really wish it would be different. But, you know, I think the most that's not accounted for is the social aspect that you're supposed to have.

That is one of the biggest like the social aspect. Yeah.

And you had just gotten that. Yeah.

There are the losses we know have been suffered by children this past year. Kids have lost family members. They've lost learning stability, sometimes access to food. There are the losses we know. But what does it mean to lose your 13th year in the world? What would have happened for Joel?

In just one year, he made a friend, he learned how to make his way through a middle school cafeteria, how to look around and say, no, not that table. Not there. Yes, here. This is the place for me. He found his first hobby.

You wanted to you could ask his peers to vote for him and his ideas and they would what else might have happened? No one ever says you're only thirty nine once, but you really are only 13. Once Joel finished seventh grade at home, he'll probably finish eighth grade at home too. And the next time he steps foot in a school building, it'll be to start high school. He's never going back to middle school.

That's gone. Whoever he might have become, that's gone to.

Conor Duffy, what is one of the producers of our show, if you have not heard her podcast, nice white parents that you made with the cereal team? It's available wherever you get your podcasts.

Good, good enough on from Gaza and Gaza Sign, a waiver program was produced today by Nadia Raymon. The people who put a show together today include Bimala Wunmi automakers Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Dana Tchividjian, call of a Kornfeld, Damien Graving, Chana Joffe, Walt Zeppelin, Mickey Miguelina, Mr. Stone Nelson, Catherine Reymundo, Ari Sapperstein, Robin Semion, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Satava, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker and Diane Wu and managing editor Sara Abderrahmane are senior editors.

David Kestenbaum, our executive editor, is a manual. Very special. Thanks today to Paul Hablas, Rachel Glassie, who is Fantastic Orany, Harrison Nesbitt, Felix and Igor Bobick, our website, This American Life. Doug, you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's lists of favorite shows, videos we've made over the years thanks to our television program and tons of other stuff there. Again, this American Life dog, This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PR expert the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to your program's co-founder, Mr. Terry Malatya. You know, he's redoing the drywall in his house.

He's got all the supplies, trowel, sandpaper ladder. It took him a long time. He was covered in white dust or as he puts it, by the end of the day, like totally plaster's.

I'm IRA Glass back next week with more stories of this American Idol Beatles. I'm not don't give them cattle's on the Web site on. On knows that are of my mom and dad's. Next week on the podcast of This American Life, Blake's friend Camille sent him an old photograph of herself in it. She's a little kid on vacation with her family in Canada.

And then I glanced back at the picture and I saw my grandma walking through behind her bathing.

Camille grew up in different states. Camille didn't know him at that age or his grandma. Coincidences. Do they mean anything next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station?