Unbeknownst to us at the time, this balance had become untenable for some who felt their grip on American politics loosening. They needed a counter-narrative, and slipped in quietly through the back door. Over the crackling waves of AM radio, a man named Rush Limbaugh—a student of Lee Atwater and a propagandist and provocateur—began to subvert this reality. Limbaugh’s style—brash, vulgar, confrontational—was magnetic to those in search of someone to blame their grievances on. No, he’d tell you, the “liberal media” is lying to you. No, you and your Democratic Party-loving neighbor don’t actually share the same values. No, you’re the real American. And wouldn’t real Americans be better off if those people didn’t have so much power? The seeds were planted, the blueprint shared.

Today it continues with the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, and Elon Musk’s X, with varying degrees of racism, sexism, and antisemitism baked in. This now-decades-long effort to divide Americans, to undo the societal bonds that have held us together, has been successful beyond its architects’ wildest dreams. The fabric of reality itself has been under a constant barrage of misinformation that will be looked back upon as one of the most successful brainwashing efforts in history. We are a shell of the former people we once were. I must fight it in myself sometimes—the way my patience thins, the way I am less trusting. We’ve grown small, frightened, and easily manipulated. We’ve lost our ability to focus on what matters and grow quickly irritated by what we’d rather avoid. We’re coarser, less compassionate. Exactly how they want us.

This concentrated effort to weaken our societal bond has paid enormous dividends for those who seek profit and power in the United States. We’ve been turned against each other, locked in a cold civil war orchestrated by parasitic capitalists who feed off the lifeblood of America. By 2020 we’d found ourselves at a breaking point—punch drunk and dazed, barely hanging on. Then, COVID-19. This is when the world as we knew it finally ended, this is where reality was pushed past its breaking point and fractured into pieces.

Over a million people died in the United States alone. Months of isolation and dread. Panic and paranoia spread through an already susceptible population primed to turn on each other, and we did. We adopted entirely different coping strategies as Democrats turned to science and Republicans rejected it. We were badly hurt—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. No one made it through the pandemic unscathed, yet we as a society have made very little intentional effort to address these wounds. It is a time we all seem eager to forget.

For the past few years, I have spent a lot of time trying to convince myself we could get back to normal. But try as I might to move along as if nothing had happened, as if there wasn’t a gaping wound in my psyche, I don’t think I can keep up the charade any longer. Something has fundamentally changed; there is a before and an after, and I call this The Fracture.

We’ve been captivated by the arrival of the digital age in the late 1990s only to look on in horror as it grew into something different over the next 20 years. Something grotesque and unrecognizable. We’ve watched as our parents fell victim to propaganda and rotted their brains like they said video games would rot ours. Families have been split in half by a culture war carefully engineered in Republican strategy meetings. Now we begin to see the emergence of a new generation raised on toxicity and misinformation. We can no longer trust our own eyes to discern what is real and what isn’t. We recognize the pot, and that we are the frogs, and we all agree on how hot the water is getting. We carry this sense of unease with us as a normal part of life now.

We are being traumatized by all of this on a daily basis, and it is killing us. It is time for us to all stop, acknowledge the pain we are carrying, and seek clarity by speaking openly about it. I believe this begins with putting a name to what we all know but are afraid to say out loud: The Fracture. Society has been fractured. Politics has been fractured. Families have been fractured. We experienced an event beyond just a pandemic; we’ve lived through a near-total collapse of society and a feeble attempt to put it back together again.

Take a moment and sit with this. You know it to be true. We go about our days waiting for a trusted voice to lead us to safety, but the institutions we have historically relied upon are now corrupted or utterly incapable of meeting the moment. Trust in religious institutions is low while belief in conspiracy theories is high. The most powerful men in the world control our media and social media, and their narratives become conventional wisdom regardless of truth or moral implication. Climate change feels like a losing battle. Justice feels like an alien concept. One wonders if there will ever be justice in this world again.

In the short years since we began pretending COVID-19 was over, we have seen an already weakened societal bond shattered beyond recognition with the re-election of Donald Trump. We are isolated from our friends and scared of our neighbors. We yearn for something real under an assault of digitally manufactured noise. It is exhausting. There is very little relief.

There is actual science behind the ways they seek to extract our money and prey on our insecurities. Go down one wrong rabbit hole on the internet and you might find yourself being influenced by a pipeline you didn’t even know existed. Get too casual checking in on your kids and they might suddenly have surprising things to say about women or Jews. Under the right circumstances, any of us can be fooled. In a media age where misinformation is far more profitable than information, every step we take is fraught with peril.

Perhaps our job is to mitigate those circumstances. This is not the same world our parents were born into, or that most of us grew up in. Those of us with the clarity to see it must accept this as truth and let this revelation inform what we do next. We must use it to hone our senses to what is real and what is not. We must use science and data to ensure our foundation is strong; we must become the architects of our future. We do not have the luxury of waiting for anyone else to fix this for us. There will be no return to normalcy. The status quo lays in pieces around us, and the forces who seek only profit and control are eager to use our complacency.

We no longer have that 6:00 news program or even a universal commitment to truth to unite us. The touchstones that kept us tethered to a unified reality have been obliterated, and we are left unmoored, adrift in a sea of cynicism. This divide is epistemological; Americans are now living in thousands of their own little mini-realities shaped to suit their ideas and not the other way around. We’ve all gotten so far away from the baseline it feels as if we’ll never be on the same page again. The fracture is in us—in the way we trust and believe in each other.

What are we to do? Our world is actively collapsing around us and yet we still have to pay the bills. Our human minds were not made to carry this amount of existential dread while working their second shift. Increasingly we are confronted by what this all is: a farce. We live in a post-modern perversion of a Manhattan ad agency’s long-forgotten American Dream. A capitalistic nightmare controlled by fascist tech-billionaire cartoon villains who sell us AI-generated illusions that distort our sense of what’s real. The truth has been laid bare that we are, in fact, extremely gullible as a society and have elected the world’s most successful con-man as President of the United States, twice.

How is one with any sense of morality or justice supposed to feel about any of this at all? How are we to find light in such darkness? Many of us seek our answers through politics, but politicians rarely live up to our hopes, and the change we need may not wait for the next election. What if our politics continuesto get worse in this country? Must we wait for the right messenger to come along? What if politics is not the answer, but yet another symptom? What if what must be healed is bigger than that?

Some of my contemporaries speak of revolution, but I fear they too are living in their own reality. Revolution in a country fluent in drone and cyber warfare might prove more difficult than some would like to admit. Perhaps total collapse is inevitable. We will see, one way or another. Personally, I choose to live for the future. We can learn much from the scholars of the past, but solving the uniquely now problems we face will require both conviction and innovation—a synthesis of old wisdom and new ideas. The futility we feel must be met with the spirit of invention. The answers we seek lie ahead, not behind.

Billionaires like Elon Musk speak aloud about the sin of empathy and expect us to take them at their word that they are of sound moral clarity. A healthy society cannot abide such nihilism, certainly not from its leaders. This apathetic rot is coming for our very foundation, seeking to deepen the fissures throughout. We must stand in opposition to it and actively combat its effects. It will require a kind of personal discipline we’ve largely forgotten—but we must remember it. We must now evolve to meet this moment, eyes open to the unique challenges we face. I have many thoughts on how to do this, but it all begins with our relationships with each other. We must find the courage to believe in empathy once again, for it is precisely what will save us. We must recommit to the value of education and community. We must heal our wounded hearts and minds through kindness and understanding.

This kind of societal mandate might typically come from a church or a government. Alas, we can no longer count on them for moral clarity. It then falls to us—those of us still committed to the sanctity of truth—to enact this change. We must engage in a new discourse that recognizes the predatory nature of our era and demands that world leaders join us in protecting the people from these forces. If they cannot lead us, we must lead them.

While I am an atheist, I have always admired faith. There is a real crisis of faith in this country, and I wonder if we might benefit by seeking it out anew in one another. I’d suggest that we build tangible, real-world bonds with our communities that replenish our spirits rather than drain them. You’ve heard something like this before—but now is the time you must reckon with it in your own life. You must take responsibility for what you consume and how you let it affect you. You must find a balance that will allow you to thrive in spite of the world around you.

One thing I have begun to do in my own life is set aside time every day to unplug. No screens, no social media, no fog of misinformation. We all do this in little ways, but we could be even more intentional in how we approach this kind of mental hygiene. You’ve probably been thinking of ways to spend more time unplugged. Fight the instinct to doomscroll. Don’t engage with the troll. Remember that most of them are quite literally not human or not American. Buy an old-school alarm-clock so the first thing you touch in the morning is not your phone. Manage your sensory intake. We are all quite literally overwhelmed, all the time. Take back control of your filters.

The Fracture has left us all damaged and dazed. Wake now to the truths we must embrace and steel ourselves for the battles ahead. Do not lose sight of your humanity in an age that seeks to use your energy to fuel the engines of corruption. We will need to find inner peace once again if we are to have the strength to fight on. We will find honor within ourselves and use its righteousness to light our path. We should be focused in both soul and spirit, intentional in how we spend our attention.

We must endure these times, and so we shall. History should reassure us of this, for we have seen humankind face unfathomable suffering and survive against all odds. This will require resilience and tenacity. It will require cooperation. It will require trust. Quiet, simple acts of rebellion will be the grain that sustains us through the long winter. Through each other, we will find the strength for more significant acts of resistance.

Something I think of often is the Japanese art of Kintsugi. It is the craft of mending broken pottery with gold, weaving beauty into the scars of something damaged to create something stronger than before. Perhaps with enough care and intention we might find the same grace. Perhaps with enough courage we might recapture our peace, our clarity, our North Star. Perhaps then we might navigate our way through The Fracture and finally chart a course to somewhere true and good. 

If you enjoyed this essay and would like to support me, please do by sharing this with a friend and starting a conversation about it.

Thank you! -Colin