Damaged people live among us. They deny, they lament, they scream, and think no one hears them. So they self-medicate, create grand illusions of fictive comfort, and when those fictions fail them, then finally, they descend into the abyss of helpless despair. When we hear our elders speak of “the good ol’ days”–we mustn’t dismiss the significance of those simpler times. They matter, because all those hordes of damaged people would have been fine in 1952, but now, they have to deal with chaos and war and complications and the economy and drugs and challenge and an ever-increasing onslaught of … Continue reading →