If you have not subscribed to The Pillar, you should, for excellent observations like this one:
The events of this year were a cascade of trials that seemed to stratify us into ever smaller pockets of solidarity: the lockdowns, the killing of George Floyd, the election, the violence at the Capitol.
Each of those events fomented division and conflict, and before we had a chance to catch our breath, the next one came around the corner. Looming over all of that was the specter of a growing death count, which ticked up silently each day, while cable news pundits gave hot takes on our disintegration.
By now, our disunity is concrete and palpable. Neighbors and family members are living in parallel constructions of reality, with divergent sets of norms, and social taboos, and expectations. We are fragmented in ways that go well beyond our habits of masking, or our opinions on vaccines.
Made clear in everything that has happened is that we are a people — inasmuch as we are one people — with no unified metaphysics, nor epistemology, nor teleology.
We are a nation bound mostly by proximity. And that hardly seems enough to hold.
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