It’s normal to want friends.
To need connection.
Even introverts require some social contact.
(So a big Fuck You to Caity Weaver for encouraging people to be ashamed of such needs in the NYT Magazine this weekend.)
It’s why solitary confinement is considered torture, and therefore is used as extreme punishment.
Yet hundreds of millions, if not billions of people lived through that torture in pandemic lockdown, in the recent past, and it’s rarely discussed.
In the US these days, (and probably elsewhere,) people are struggling, angry, and have lost the ability to calmly communicate with each other. Yet many people are trying to figure out why they’re having such a hard time in a rigged system, right after the world lived through conditions that aged some brains by 10 years.
These are hard times, (in my therapist’s words,) as America has succumbed to Oligarchy, yet it is poorly understood beyond the cultural fringe.
When I was a Freshman at Duke University, (where I double-majored in History and Economics,) I took Intro to American History, with Dean Gerald Wilson.
My first paper was the assigned subject: “Was the Progressive Era Actually Progressive?”
At 18, I didn’t know even what progressive meant, (back in 1992,) and most certainly didn’t have an informed opinion.
Ever the good student, though, I just needed to read the text book, stake out a position, pull evidence with quotes, and I was good to go.
As such, I got an “A” on the paper.
Not much knowledge was acquired, but in my second semester, I took another History class, from Professor John D. French, which opened my eyes to the “real” US history of conquest and territorial acquisition, which undergirded America’s success as a country.
(This History is becoming “banned” more and more each day.)
I might not have learned if America was actually progressive back then, but I did learn that the concentration of wealth and power, during the Gilded Age, was so bad, it almost broke society.
Miraculously, trust busting, anti-monopolistic practices, and increased unionization, approx 100 years ago, allowed the US to build a middle class, which was (once) the envy of the world.
These days, we know that for one group to have resources, most of the time, another group has to have less.
Which leads to all sorts of conflict.
In an Oligarchical society, the most powerful people are always a super-minority.
Dozens of people, in a nation of more than 330 million.
It’s why they work so hard to keep everyone distracted, squabbling and desperate.
And the Oligarchs fight tooth and nail to maintain the power and control they’ve established.
We’re reading about this reality piecemeal, whether it’s an article about Getty heirs dodging taxes in The New Yorker, or Robert Reich dropping knowledge bombs on Twitter.
The overall narrative, though, never penetrates the minds and hearts of all those angry people.
Don’t be angry at your neighbor, your Mom, or the “other.”
Instead, be angry at the super-rich people who think they should be worth $1 trillion, so you have to decide whether you can afford to buy vegetables for your kids.
I’m telling you: this is officially a time in history when things are fucked up.
A century ago, such conditions led to WWII, and the Holocaust, in which my race/culture was almost wiped out.
Nobody likes a know-it-all, (I get it,) but we artists are the canaries in the coal-mine.
Time for some collective energy to make society livable again.
Sunshine and Olly 
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