What’s hard—hard, hard, hard—in America is the anger.
Everyone feels this: This, the anger; this, the hard of it.
Cheerios for eight bucks? One bus a day where a train ought to run on the hour? Any signs of the neighbor-to-neighbor credibility and discernable middle class and “Red, Please Meet Blue” rhetoric that binds a people together? The poster child of Christian grift and lawless billionaires once again our chief moral export to a world beset by faith-based killing and purchasable sovereigncy?
Everyone’s got something to be angry about, a reason to rage, a mirror to punch.
Yet harder than the anger is the sadness.
Sprawl and empty storefronts and a culture of “my screen is my love” all push down loss as much as call up frustration, all remind us of what we once had and the simple pleasures we might still embrace if only we were not so materialistic and so insistent on how right we are and so insistent on the grievance that comes with unmet expectations.
And the thing about sadness is that we can’t shoot it down, Karen it out of ourselves, or woke it away.
Everyone’s terrified, of course, but maybe of nothing so much as confronting sadness rather than wielding the club of anger.