A boiling point for American violence

This is the other side of the Covid story, the one we don’t like to talk about. While Saint Fauci and his harem of Karens insisted it was easy — all you had to do was wear a mask, all you had to do was order from DoorDash and not think about the dude who actually had to drop off your vegan chimichangas — the edges of our society were bleeding. The usual avenues of hope, from classrooms to after-school sports, were blocked off. And so some teens instead got their kicks lifting Subarus. It wasn’t just them. Think of the lonely and shut-in twentysomething who began drinking alone, or the working-from-home empty-nester who found herself drawn in to lurid Reddit conspiracy boards.

The common denominator here is nihilism, a sense that nothing matters, or that there isn’t anything to matter. Thucydides wrote of a horrible plague that ravaged Athens during the Peloponnesian War, which he said heralded “the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness” in which “no fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence.” Certainly the crime here in America isn’t quite so unprecedented — this has always been a violent country — but our own Covid plague does seem to have hollowed out something essential. Stripped of meaning and uncertain about the future, some have filled the void with bloodshed.