After nearly two years of the pandemic, we're now clearly going through an epidemic of trauma and rage.
American society is fraying at the seams.
An undiscussed impact of life amid COVID is that everyone is getting a bit more deranged and we're confronting a broad rise in aggressive and antisocial behavior.
We see it in the documented surge of reckless drunk driving, attacks on healthcare workers and schoolboard officials, students lashing out at teachers, and in people getting into fights.
Workers who face the public say Americans are devolving into children. They scream at servers, throw tantrums over sold-out items, and knock out the teeth of flight attendants.
People are so wound up with worry and anxiety that the smallest thing sends them into a tailspin of hysteria.
Let's face it - we're suffering from collective trauma. With Omicron feeling like the recurrence of a nightmare, many people are near the breaking point. Buckling under the stress of a long-lasting public emergency with no clear end point - not to mention supply chain shortages, extreme-weather disasters, and bitter political and social divisions - Americans are bringing their internal struggles to bear on interactions with strangers.
The problem is likely to get worse rather than better. Frustration-aggression theory tells us that when people are chronically frustrated and then experience stressors, aggression will follow.
Frustration intensified when we thought the pandemic was ending last spring, only to be hit with two successive new variants. People are asking, "Will this ever end?"
Even before the pandemic, the nation was seeing soaring rates of depression, suicide, and overdoses.
Social media and all the shit Donald Trump unleashed on the national ID: He gave his followers permission to openly hate people, and his opponents to hate them back.
But there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this. Americans are becoming more narcissistic, more aggressively tribal, more antisocial.
Something darker and deeper is afflicting our society.
And we better wake up soon before it all crumbles apart.
