Trust does not come easy. It takes years of hard work to build, even if it is just between two people. You can start out the best of friends, getting along with a certain person or group of people possibly better than anyone you have met before. Then you realize that trust is fragile; it can teeter on a bed of lies, like most other things, but only for so long. Trust, like anything, must be constantly proven again and again. And, like all hard work, the process of building and rebuilding trust becomes exhausting, especially during a time of great financial gain. Why does the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth in the hands of a few almost always end in devastation? Is money evil? No, money is just paper with dead men's faces and evil is a concept for those who remain afraid of the real world. But it remains a fact that financial gain often turns the heart to stone. People begin to fantasize about a world with fewer taxes without first establishing that the remaining taxes go to the people who need them the most. People begin to encourage those struggling in their communities to seek out the church instead of seeking out the financial advisor or the addiction therapist or the suicide hotline. Prayer is all that will do, mostly because of the erosion of trust between society and the government, society and the media, society and the education system, society and big business...Are you starting to see a pattern here? Organizations, whether they be privately or publicly owned, who continue to fight for themselves and no one else eventually become so useless to society that society divorces itself from these institutions altogether. Even now, as I type these very words, I am reminded of the absent-minded, empty, strictly business, pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that I dealt with in the working world. The way in which a person's break or lunch is ignored, almost treated as secondary or the way we are expected to be on time all the time, even if we do not have cars, even if the transit system is shit. None of this is new to anyone. I often think the news only exist today to give rich people the false sense of actually caring about what is going wrong because nothing ever changes. No one ever actually makes the transit system more efficient. No one ever actually becomes more empathetic or lays off a bit with the constant expectation of perfection all while paying someone next to nothing for the work they do. I still remember being left out of all the raises, all the promotions. People would laugh at you almost when you applied for all the jobs they just used to give away to boomers like candy. Every single time you go into the damn interview, "not enough experience". How do you get the experience if no one is ever willing to give it to you? Oh, right, you're supposed to have rich parents who buy you rich people schooling. Eh, who needs it? Who needs any of it? Who needs to constantly be reminded of their failures? Who needs to watch some pompous ass brag about their umpteenth promotion? I have a secret to tell you. I do not want to go to your house an hang out. I do not want to see that new high rise you just bought. It is just going to sink or collapse anyway. There is really no point to any of this rat race crap because all the owners have already decided that success is only for people who support insurrections. We peaceful, law abiding citizens, however, are to suffer in poverty as the red party calls us communists. The irony is so strong that you almost forget it is even there; perhaps that is the endgame. And now, as we see the big power players once again flip-flopping on mask mandates, once again politicizing our health, it is important to remember who put in this position. That much of the disasters you are now seeing were predicted decades ago and could have prevented, had any of our institutions invested in us and not themselves. If you want a functioning society you must allow it to function.