If one were to seek some descriptive words to describe the societal and financial mess in which we Americans now find ourselves, I suggest the following would be an apt simile: It often feels like rabid monkeys are dropping from the trees, chasing us down the street, and biting us on our butts.

Of course, this does not describe everyone’s situation; many Americans (usually those who live far away from a Democrat-run major cities) are perfectly content and enjoying their lives, families, and jobs. Remember that the freaked-out people posting those videos about their miserable lives are generally from places such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—very few in rural Kansas or a small city in Texas are crying in their cars on TikTok.

However, given that roughly 80% of our nation’s population lives in areas that are classified as urban, there are plenty of Americans dealing with a high cost of living coupled with a deteriorating quality of life, which is going to fray anyone’s nerves. It is extraordinarily difficult today to find a big city with a Mayor who is not enamored with high taxes, a suffocating regulatory regime, and business-as-usual governmental corruption. Plug in a lot of sweetheart union contracts that slow governmental systems to a crawl and a shockingly blasé attitude toward public safety, and many of our major cities are veering toward the Dickensian in both appearance and character.

Money—and the lack thereof—is, of course, the major challenge now facing both government at all levels and Americans below the income levels of professional athletes. Moreover, the preponderance of Marxist Mayors who seem intent on driving away successful businesses and the well-paying jobs they provide is putting yet more stress on already overstressed municipal budgets. Infrastructure is expensive to maintain and cities are stuck doing the bare minimum to forestall collapse, the prices of groceries as plebeian as a couple of pounds of hamburger are extortionate, public education is a hot mess of Leftist politics and left-behind students, and except for those luxurious apartments occupied by the top 1%, much of the housing stock in our major cities is in an advanced state of decay.

We also are living through the blowback of decades of broken homes and the broken lives they tend to produce. Lifetimes of mommy and daddy issues have bequeathed us lots of nose rings and tattoos that serve as the physical signifiers of the psyches of scarred and damaged individuals who are always scared because they lack a functional emotional foundation. Schools and colleges deal with these traumas on a daily basis—and, unfortunately, teach that these are badges of honor rather than problems to overcome—and it is left to employers to later winnow out the whiners, who are often shocked at just how little tolerance businesses have for tardiness and tantrums.

Psychoactive drugs—whether prescribed by a doctor or purchased from one’s friendly neighborhood drug dealer—cannot compensate for childhoods marked by chaos, abuse, and neglect, and few learn until they have already further damaged their lives and future prospects that healing and numbing are not at all the same. Pain compounds with each new generation of divorce, single parenthood—or no parents at all. Sadly, the cycle of deficient and despairing childhoods will typically start anew when, as the poet Phillip Larkin once wrote:

“They f*ck you up, your mum and dad. 
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you.”

America’s sad reality today is that just over 40% of first marriages will end in divorce, just under a quarter of children live in single-parent households (triple the world average), 40% of children are born out of wedlock, and grandparents are increasingly the replacements for mothers and fathers who are absent or simply unavailable.

If you ever wondered why borderline feral youngsters are routinely engaging in behaviors that were once the province of hardened criminals—assaults, robberies, rapes, and murders—look no further than what is (and is not) happening in quasi-homes across our nation. Juvenile court systems across America now operate as revolving doors that practice ideologically-driven forgiveness for crimes that clearly merit punishment, and they are unconcerned with the individual and societal consequences of simply discharging delinquents back onto the streets to violently reoffend or, perhaps, (if we are lucky) simply be total jerks to everyone.

These troubles point us toward the most delicate and difficult of the challenges now heaped upon our tired shoulders: our telling lack of connection with the spiritual. This is not synonymous with church, temple, or mosque attendance, nor it it measured by private prayer or public displays of faith. The spiritual is far broader than religious faith; it speaks to our ability to connect to a community beyond our own selfish interests and calm our minds in times of duress through this sometimes elusive sense of belonging to—and with—others.

Our lives are tests of whether we can be kind in the face of brutality, comforting to others when we ourselves are stretched thin, and empathize with existences vastly different than our own. This is not foolish self-sacrifice of which I speak; it is the strength to recognize our common humanity and give back to others instead of taking, taking, taking.

Most importantly, we must be brave enough to not allow the coarsest and loudest to convince others to abandon decency, caring, and self-respect. The monsters among us believe that degrading others can magically validate their own twisted lives, and the moral relativists that rule our chattering class of soulless intellectuals will demand dogmatic (and dog-like) obedience to evil because for some reason we are supposed to be open-minded about abuse.

The spiritual, the temporal, and the financial are our damnation today, and salvation might be far away, but we must persevere and protect those whom we love—and deserving strangers as well.