I'm reading Hillbillly Elegy and am very shaken by it. These are stories of raw, raw stuff. There are tens of millions of stories in America exactly like it, white and black, right and left, native and immigrant. It makes me think very hard and sadly about how close I might have come in my life to a story like these, even while hailing from one of the most secure towns in America. The wounds of the past never heal easily, maybe they're never meant to heal at all, but the ability to see extraordinary kinship in people who seem different, no matter what their stupendous glaring flaws, no matter how different their cultural or political orientation differs from ours, is the only way we might have some salvation. One day, our society will either have somehow forgiven each other and just decide the grievances are not worth the steep price of redressing them, or we're going to stay angry and do far far worse things to each other, until the only way we can stay alive is to forgive much, much worse sins than any which have been perpetrated so far.
...The world is terrible.
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