There's a point at which the cup of endurance runneth over.
Of late I've been talking with people about the crisis of loneliness, something I was also trying to write about in the space over the last few days. At least in America, the phrase now seems quaint. An alcoholic lying in their own vomit may be suffering from a crisis of loneliness, but there are other issues as well.
Being a human being is no easy trick. By all reports, the difficulty involved has been universal and true at all times. Maybe there is no equivalence between the need to gather food in 2000 B.C. and keeping your YouTube account going now, but no one is so privileged they live without pain.
Towards surviving, even flourishing, there is nothing so necessary to being a person as other people. The only advantage humans have over other animals in the long term is that we can talk and plan and adjust and build.
We sometimes call our collective work society or civilization or culture or government and while the triumphs of the individual, the Michelangelos and Shakespeares are one sign of who we are at our best, it is really cities and public squares, theaters, and the voting booth where we see our species, if not at their best, striving to be as good as it can be. The collective effort.
For a brief time in history, America claimed a special purchase on that effort. The rule of law, not of kings. The we. The people. The pursuit not just of food, but of happiness too. For all the faults, civilization planted a flag somewhere between Philidelphia and Hollywood and the gravity of what America did bent the long arc of justice towards human flourishing.
Now we are long, long beyond that. What can endure no more. We are not fighting for each other’s children. We are murdering them instead.