When I was young there was an abandoned house in our town. Kids told the story of a young girl who had been hit and killed at her school bus stop and how it had driven her mother insane. The woman, it was said, washed the girl’s clothes, kept her room, made her meals and walked to the bus stop every day until finally, she just disappeared.

It strikes me that much of our society is in that same state. We go through the motions of the life we remember; doing our jobs, shopping for goods, planning for the short term and hoping that one day we will wake from our nightmare and everything will be like it was. But the truth is, that will not happen. Our country has been changed forever and that is a hard cold fact.