Something Feels Different About This Summer
Joy is—pun intended—the goal.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
*This essay is not about singlehood. As a writer, I cannot exclusively limit my work to one topic, both for my ability to grow and for my mental health. I was never meant to write about only one thing, and I don’t think you were meant to read about one thing, either. Thank you for allowing me to branch out.
You don’t have to be chronically online to catch wind of what’s happening. Scots in Boston, South Koreans in Guadalajara, Algerians in Kansas, New Yorkers in the streets. Technically, they’re all coming together because of sports. But you can’t witness the joy, love, bonding, and community that’s bursting from people this summer and think the only thing we’re celebrating is a ball in a net.
We needed this. Collectively, as human beings, there has been a starvation for togetherness, for connecting with people from different perspectives and cultures, for gathering in groups and sharing a common comfort. I can’t speak for people in other countries, but I know the United States has been uniquely hungry. We want to connect, we want to bond, we want to find common ground so that we feel excited to love and share. But we haven’t been able to do that since a right wing cruelty machine started churning relentlessly, just to keep one man out of prison and in grotesque wealth.
What MAGA did erased the option of community. I can’t dance in the street with people who see kidnappings and family separations, concentration camps, feckless war, women bleeding to death, thriving child sex crime perpetrators, poverty-inducing greed, and do nothing more than cheer it on. Those are not the kind of differences you overlook, and they’re damn sure not the kind you celebrate. The sports-related warmth and love we are witnessing is reminding us what we could have if we didn’t have MAGA.