I've been saying that we have never really gotten over the trauma of Covid. This piece really lays it all out. Please read it, as it's better than any superficial analysis I could offer.
A taste:
These recent large-scale hurts magnify one another because they are so tightly grouped together; they are especially deep because we have come to understand every single one of them as a betrayal: It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The government was supposed to work. The planet shouldn’t turn on us. We are a democracy with an orderly and peaceful transition of power. Children should not be shot at school.
Admittedly, these promises have only spotty integrity over the centuries (some of them were never really true). Today, they are all being broken simultaneously. As we experience betrayals again and again, the breaches of trust become both more impersonal and less coherent. There is no one person to blame, but we also can’t write off our tragedy to a twist of fate. What we have been through couldn’t have happened to just anyone. We cannot exactly follow the chain of causation to a single intelligible event, and yet there is nothing about our experience that’s an accident.
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