We don’t have a shared reality anymore

This is still America.

Last week’s newsletter didn’t age well. A starry-eyed essay about release and collective rituals to usher in a new year. Just let me bask in the goodness of that feeling for a few days because who in America really believes it’ll last?

What I choose to believe instead is our human capacity for hope. It’s fundamentally our baseline, like a compass eventually righting itself even when submerged in the chaos sown by the moral failures of our government in the name of American exceptionalism. Hope is a survival response, but this country has an extraordinary way of beating you down.

Halfway through January (what, already?) and hope is being tested, again. Who else has this song stuck in their heads seven years later?

The politically loaded music video, laden with symbolism and historical references, was shocking when we first saw it. This brazen depiction of violence in America will never not be relevant. But it’s the smiling, uniformed schoolchildren dancing while cars are burning and police chaos erupts around them that left a lingering impression on me the most.

I think about it still because the juxtaposition between chaos and oblivion plays out everyday: influencers in my feed next to by-stander videos of violent confrontations. Hollywood celebrating their golden statues while a war against their fellow Americans by the federal government rages on in Minnesota 1,800 miles away. The clash between the horrific and the sublime coexists seamlessly on social media. Violence is reduced to content. Context switching hits like whiplash.