Everything is weird and everyone is wrecked. This is maybe the biggest and least acknowledged truth of life in the United States and a lot of places beyond right now. It’s the pandemic; the eight years of Trumpism; the distortions, disruptions and corruptions Silicon Valley has promulgated and other looming menaces, including climate chaos. We all know this, because we’re living it, but maybe we should talk more about the fact that our political catastrophes are inseparable from widespread psychic devastation, that the public and private, political and personal, are entangled – or rather that the former has wrought havoc on the latter.

The wisest people I know are aware that the stresses, atrocities, divisions and divergences from norms of recent years have made them (and everyone else) exhausted and brittle. The less wise but no less brittle either lash out with the sense that what’s wrong is definitely someone else or take refuge in cults and oversimplified versions in which they are at least in control of what it all means.

Public life has private impact; some of it breaks our brains, and some of it breaks our hearts. Not to leave our consciences out of this – to watch so much malice and willful destruction, to witness so much injustice, from genocides around the world to gross injustices at home, has an impact. That impact is probably best described as moral injury, which a veterans’ organization defines as “the psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal or transgression of one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in high stakes situations”.

Most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable or possible based on what’s happened before; but we are now lost in a sea of unprecedenteds. We have not had authoritarian threats like this arise in all three branches of the federal government (if you count a former president aspiring to be a dictator as well as the supreme court and Congress). We have not previously had the wild corrosion of information and our ability to pay........

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