How It All Fits Together

We have walked through a lot. Let me set it next to itself.

Hadley's closing. The subjects we cannot speak at dinner. The online rooms. The things that cannot be said. The quieter kitchens. The smaller homes. Rosa growing up inside the screens. The lost work. The man at the bus stop. Helen, who I no longer see. The elders we no longer visit. The religion-shaped hole. The quiet loss of trust. The numbers that do not add up. The biggest players gone from the room. The rivers, the fish, the birds. The air we sent somewhere else. The race above us.

Each of these, alone, would be survivable. Shops have always closed. Dinner subjects have always been awkward. Work has always changed.

What is unusual about our time is that all of them are happening at once, and each is making the others worse.

The online rooms make the dinner arguments impossible. The impossible arguments make the quieter kitchens easier, because who would bring a child into a home where the parents cannot talk? The kitchens make the debt harder. The debt makes the state weaker. The weaker state makes more men like the one at the bus stop. The men at the bus stops make the elections stranger. The strange elections make the biggest players more likely to leave. The biggest players leaving makes the debt worse. The thinning friendships make the loneliness worse. The loneliness makes the rooms more powerful. And all the while, the birds disappear, the trust leaks away, the rivers are being fought over, and the race above our heads is going on without most of us knowing it is.

This is a lot for any country to hold at once. It is more, I think, than most countries can hold at once.

Something, somewhere, is going to give.

I do not know what. Nobody does. But when pressures of this size build up, they tend not to release gently.