America has a problem

Are you familiar with the collective feeling of the moment? It's an ache that cries out across headlines, conversations, FYP's, and even moments of stillness. It’s not just the missiles being thrown or the next natural disaster; it’s the quiet realization that something fundamental in our country has cracked open, maybe long ago, and we’re finally starting to feel the full weight of it. It's festering and dying. People are tired. People are scared. According to some, we don't deserve to be. So instead, we try to make sense of our nation that keeps insisting it's fine - great, even - as the infection spreads.

In this moment, it would be disingenuous of me to continue writing and posting like nothing is wrong. We all know it is. But rather than lament about the possibility of entering WWIII or the continuing horror show of ICE disappearing our neighbors, I want to offer a different perspective on America's problem. It's not just a deep-rooted history of violence toward anyone who isn't white, male, wealthy, or able-bodied.

It's also a self-perpetuating guilt that plagues the majority of us from doing the work to heal.

For the sake of context, let's get politics out of the way. In all honesty, this is the first chapter of a much deeper story. It's what we all think and speak of first when considering the nation's downfall. And it's true: we are a nation built on the backs of natives, slaves, prisoners and immigrants. Because of their labor, their wit, their resolve, their ideas, their creativity, their contributions, we have established the best possible outcome for life on Earth. The American Dream is not a complete myth - I never believed it to be - when we have endless examples of marginalized people coming up from nothing. It is a playbook that works.

But of course, as with any promise, there is a catch. We have many of those. As we're seeing unfold now, we live under a tyrannical government willing to take drastic measures and billions of dollars to solve the problem of illegal immigration (which isn't as clear-cut a crime as they want us to think it is), but give absolutely nothing for normalized school shootings and political violence. As Jon Stewart put so expertly in a recent episode of The Daily Show, "one life is too many," according to many current politicians, for situations in which an immigrant committed a murder - but not where a Palestinian child burns to death, or a student at Uvalde was shot, or a teen in rural Appalachia overdoses on fentanyl they didn't mean to take.

The only issues that get attention and resources are those that our leaders decide are issues, and they are almost laughably hypocritical in making those decisions. I only say laughable because I would fall to my knees and sob otherwise.

But now that I say that...maybe I should.

Because here's where we get into the next chapter: one where we largely bypass hard feelings and hard truths due to a hypernormalization of them. Gen Z often gets scolded for making memes and jokes out of every terrible thing that happens in the world around them. Who could blame them, though, when the sentiment they've grown up on is just the same as above? "You have to laugh or else you'll cry." It's interesting, and also a bit counterintuitive, because this may be the first generation that was able to embrace a full spectrum of emotion more freely than any before them. Still, the deep and dark feelings are too scary to touch. It's easier to acknowledge them with a heavy dose of sarcasm and blast it onto the internet: everyone will understand, and they'll laugh along.

I don't really have an answer here, because I, too, fall into this category. I don't know how to feel my feelings other than through intellectualizing them, using everyone who'll listen as a sounding board for what to do about them. Maybe the problem is that I believe they must be "dealt with," packaged up neatly in a box to send to the back of closet, wrapped up neatly in some story to be sold to Instagram as a lesson learned. It seems that even the trenches are a profitable territory. If we can't be happy all the time, then we must use those inferior emotions for clickbait.

There is still something to be said for sharing the darker parts of ourselves with others, online or otherwise. It helps us cope and understand one another better, even in the midst of this hypernormalization era. The strange beauty of that phenomenon is that we're all experiencing it simultaneously: we all know something is deeply fractured about this moment, but we're too locked in for the daily grind to really do much about it. This unspecified, mysterious thing that we can't name has virtually no power over bills, groceries, deadlines and duties and social obligations for no other reason than the fact that it isn't tangible.

But even deeper than that? Acknowledging it would break the status quo of individually going about our days. It would require more community than we are ready to create.

Even when communities are strong, it's largely for leisure - in the most extreme circumstances, perhaps obligation. This makes me think about my own neighborhood, where about a month ago, an intense thunderstorm took out a tree on an older man's property and blocked access to his car. I had somewhere to be for work, so I couldn't help. I learned later that a few other elder neighbors and some of their kids helped move the tree, chop it up, and clear it from his property before they left him to clean the small debris on his car (thankfully it wasn't damaged). This was a wonderful display of modern community, but from what I've seen, they haven't spoken since. I don't even know the man's name.

We haven't had to rely much on strangers, or even neighbors, for a few generations now. Our markets have largely prioritized automation and convenience for the individual that eliminates a "group effort" from the picture for the most part. So moments where it does happen are sacred, like helping a neighbor in need. It's not that we all need to be friends, or that we need to volunteer like it's our second job, or that we throw block parties every month...but the more we practice these things, the more resourced we'll be.

I've written at length about the loneliness epidemic in the past, so I won't get on the same soapbox here. What I will say is yet another sentiment we've largely agreed on: isolation is ruining us. Being not only nervous, but uninterested, in learning our neighbors' names or in helping our local community in some way is an unfortunate symptom and byproduct of decades of self-indulgence. Online shopping and delivery services have all but erased the need to interact with people face-to-face. They've dulled our courage in social situations that occur beyond our closest friend groups. The discomfort isn't worth the hidden blessings because, again, they are mysterious, formless, and unfamiliar.

The next chapter covers why this is happening to us, and how it all circles back to the decision-makers at the top. My answer might surprise you: we are all living under lineages of severe neglect.

It runs rampant - practically in every household in this country - but is rarely talked about. Even if we happen to be blessed with perfectly loving, fiercely present parents, it's likely that somewhere in their recent histories, they weren't treated with the same attention. This observation isn't as simple as the current trend to chide parents who give their two-year-olds iPads; it extends deep into the cultural fabric of this country where children were forced to work, compete with their siblings for food, contend with alcohol and gambling and drugs for their parents' love, and grow up in a system that would never favor them unless their parents happened to be able to afford them education and an estate.

Modern analysts love to point out our country's exorbitant rates of heart disease, obesity, drug abuse, depression and anxiety - but they never mention the statistics that came from arguably the largest and most profound study on child abuse and neglect in history, ACE, completed by Robert Anda in 1997: Putting resources toward this particular epidemic would "reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three quarters" (Van der Kolk, 150).

This pattern of abuse and neglect is so common and so deep-seated in our culture that I believe it has led us to be not only resentful of people who have it "better" elsewhere in the world (think Northern European countries like Sweden and Norway), but has driven up some of the largest problems that plague our country. Those mentioned above are widely known, but we put virtually no lasting resources or funding toward them. No amount of wars in the Middle East, no amount of doom-scrolling TikTok or compulsively checking the news, no amount of pillaging for oil or nuclear weapons or lithium will solve the crisis we face here at home: we are so starved for care. We are so starved for love. We are so starved for community that actually provides.

I still believe in this country - I believe that we can actually learn from our long history of abuse and finally do some forward-momentum healing from it. I believe in our people. There are so many things I love about us - though we love individualism, we still value celebration and gathering. We're curious and genuine. We're pretty damn friendly and will gladly open up about our experiences. We're determined, for better or worse, to achieve and succeed and always, always strive to do better.

But here's what we'll need to do if we want to heal, and it starts with knowing and accepting that not every achievement can be met as quickly as we'd like. This problem is an undertaking that will require much more collaborative effort than we've had the capacity for. It's almost certainly not going to come to fruition before we've made our grand exit from this life...scary, I know - but true.

Once we've made peace with the longevity of this mission, we'll need to detach from the stories our current media powers are spinning to make us afraid of one another. We will always have more in common with the undocumented man looking for work outside the corner store than we ever will with the billionaires telling us to hate him. We will have to very closely inspect the sources we're choosing to trust (and this is another conversation on media literacy, which I've also written at length about). Perhaps above all, we have to remember our cultural history, our violence, our hypocrisies, and keep them in tact while many leaders are hard at work to erase them.

We need to unlearn our fear of strangers. Simple actions like checking in on neighbors, attending a town hall meeting, or even introducing ourselves to someone we think looks friendly can make a significant difference; even if it's only one person, these actions can demonstrate how good it feels to be in connection with fellow human. The concept of collective care gets integrated into our daily life by fostering a mindset of empathy and cooperation. If we routinely practice active listening, offer help when needed, and stay open to receiving support from others, we will be well on our way.

We need to care for ourselves, still, even whilst prioritizing a more collective future. It doesn't solve everything - it can't, and it was never meant to. But true self-care is a promise to ourselves that we will not abandon the body we were born in, nor the mind we inhabit. To the best of our ability, we will be our own best friend, our own provider. It is the motivation to understand what it means to love the self as we do others. Self-care is critical in times of uncertainty, collapse, and fear. And it is so much deeper and more sacred than getting a manicure.

No one is really interested in "wellness" in the form of affirmations or rituals for stifling the cries of our current world, are they? (If they are, kindly steer them away from my page.) What I'm more interesting in offering is wellness in forms that help us stay sane whilst fighting for a better world.

One thing I can promise is that if we're really in this, it's not going to be fun or sweet or easy. True healing rarely is.