Hunky actor Alan Ritchson preaching on his Instagram channel

We have to remember that these past four years have been insane, and 2020 was enough to take people who were already on the edge, over the top.

People are attempting to understand and reconcile what has been unfolding before our collective eyes, and they either hang on to any shred of sanity by the skin of their teeth, by turning to science, fact based information and the data, or they lose it by turning to supernatural beings, while others just go haywire, and join domestic terrorist groups like those guys that wanted to kidnap and try Michigan’s Governor. Others get into the whole QAnon mess, and others say, “Fuck it. Let’s tear this shit down and burn whatever’s left”, and take to the streets, rioting, looting, and even having their mom drive them down to what would become a shooting gallery where a 17 year old would end up taking the life of a very real human being, unlike his game-boy fantasy that he spent months savoring and playing out on a computer screen, rather than being in school, like he was last year, before a pandemic tore through our nation, unabated and as ruthless as the cop who murdered George Floyd on Facebook Live.

We have been living in a time that will go down in history books. An era that will be studied 100 years from now (if we make it), with a bunch of college kids shaking their damned head, asking themselves the same question all of us reasonable people have been asking each other and ourselves, “How on earth could something like this occur in America, especially on the year 2020”?

People are shell shocked. We all have some level of PTSD, and that includes the batch of us who held on to our common sense and human decency throughout this shit show. And any of those attributes could have easily morphed and devolved into irrational behavior driven by fear, at any time, especially had Trump won a second term.

Imagine how we all would have just been profoundly hopeless and dejected, had we had this lunatic voted in one more time, for 4 more years of this. And we honestly have no idea how bad it would have gotten , because every single time we thought things could not get worse than they already were, they inevitably would, EVERY SINGLE TIME.

We’re going to have a lot of mental illness and mental health issues come to the fore in the next few years, as we observe fellow Americans dealing with the aftermath of what we have been subjected to.

We were denied our very own safety and health. We were denied our very own lives, and 30% or more of our fellow Americans, many of whom are our own relatives, parents, coworkers, people we once trusted, were manipulated to the point that they willingly and defiantly chose to deny the basic instinct of self preservation and survival, in order to pursue the very worst of attributes that make a society do the inexplicable, by risking their own lives and the lives of their own families and communities, not even stopping to see or recall the images of mass graves that were filled with dead bodies and people struggling to survive in triage and ICU units that weren’t even inside a hospital because there wasn’t any room for them.

That sort of information, that sort of accounting of the collective conscience of a nation, will fuck with MANY men and women, HARD.

If this dude chose this as a coping mechanism in order to make it through, so be it. Either he will readjust and step away from his delusions as any mentally stressed, yet normal person will, or he will go in all the way and commit to the delusion.

Hopefully, he’ll make it back out, and start thinking for himself.

I get it. It’s scary & lonely AF when you realize nothing is out there to save you. Some of us cannot cope with that really harsh reality, and just give up, out of sheer hopelessness.

Be grateful if you hung on to your mind and kept your sanity intact, because this has been some unprecedented stuff, and for many, checking out was an attractive option.

Reality hurts, because reality bites - & it has bitten us all, HARD.

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