There was a time when I lived in a place that felt whole. Not at all perfect, but coherent, a place where people understood themselves well enough to understand each other. Ethics weren’t abstract; they were lived and understood. One’s accountability wasn’t feared; it was woven into the fabric of relationship. People cared enough to correct one another, and, for the most part, humble enough to be corrected.
But when I look upon this country now, it feels like I’m standing in a different world entirely. The landscape is the same with the towns, the roads, the familiar silhouettes of buildings still in place. Yet the atmosphere has changed. It’s as if a heavy fog has settled over everything, blurring the lines between truth and distortion, between leadership and ego, between governance and self‑interest.
The chaos didn’t appear overnight. It grew slowly, like cracks spreading through old stone. You could see it in the way people began to talk past one another, in the way fear replaced curiosity, in the way anger became a default posture rather than a response to injustice.
And beneath it all, one truth kept rising to the surface: people were hurting, and there were fewer and fewer places for that hurt to go.
The absence of real mental health support became a kind of silent catastrophe. People who needed care, containment, and guidance were left to navigate their storms alone. Some turned inward and collapsed. Others turned outward and lashed. And in the vacuum of support, the loudest, most reactive voices began to shape the public mood.
At the same time, something else was happening, something more difficult to name. Power was shifting into the hands of people who seemed less interested in stewardship and more interested in dominance. Ego inflated where humility was needed. Ignorance hardened where wisdom should have softened. And in some cases, the behavior of those in authority looked less like leadership and more like untreated psychological struggle playing out on a national stage.
The combination was combustible: widespread emotional distress, unmet mental health needs, and leaders whose inner instability echoed outward into policy, rhetoric, and public life.
The result was a country that felt like it was tearing at its seams, and not because its people were inherently broken, but because the systems meant to support them had eroded, and the people meant to guide them had forgotten the weight of their responsibility.
Yet even in the midst of this fractured light, I know there are places where the old code of ethics still lives. Communities where people show up for one another. Circles where accountability is gentle and firm. Homes where presence is practiced. Groups where sanity is cultivated intentionally.
These pockets of coherence remind me that the parallel universe I once lived in wasn’t imaginary. It was simply rare. And it is still possible.
Maybe the work now is to build those pockets again, small, steady, human-sized sanctuaries where clarity can grow, where people can heal, and where the old moral gravity can reassert itself.
Because even in a country that feels chaotic, the blueprint for something better is still alive in the people who remember it.
