This website typically does not offer opinions. We just give you the facts as we find them—as the name signifies, when we have time. So forgive a brief interruption of the norm and just hear this one out for a moment.
I was taking a brief, beautiful early fall walk near a bus station today in a small capital city in the United States. The sun was shining, the sky was bright, and suddenly that sunshine was spilling down on top of a woman clearly in mental distress, shouting and bellowing out prayers to Jesus at the bus stop and raging incessantly while everyone around her ignored her.
In the midst of all this, a small group of other people, seemingly intoxicated by meth or fentanyl, slowly proceeded in a death march into oblivion as their drugs had clearly taken hold. Their lives, at least in that moment, seemed lonely and deprived of all the goodness this world actually has to offer.
Seeing things like this—and actually looking, not just walking away, but really looking—you realize you can’t help. Or maybe you’re not brave enough to try. So you keep walking, too.
And the world moves on with this cold and callous response, while somehow we still attempt to call ourselves normal, educated and civilized.
Meanwhile, civilization itself breaks down around us, and yet we have the audacity to call them mentally ill. We ignore our own reflections in the mirror because we don’t want to admit that perhaps the mentally ill ones are also the cold and callous people who exist in this society and pretend the reality around them isn’t happening.
Oh, it’s happening all right.
It’s happening every day and every moment. And as we get crushed by kill shot after kill shot of reality, we keep going about our business in the strangest way possible: pretending that our business is just fine.
Civilization itself may have broken down, but damn it, we need the $7 coffee to prove that we’re still civilized.