I have absolutely no comprehension of such people at all.

And I am not perfect by any means. I have a temper. I have done things I have regretted. Nothing terrible but I'm not happy about them. I try to be sympathetic to people who do bad things.

But there's a level of grinning psychopathy I just cannot wrap my head around.

Since no one else will read this, I will share with you my tentative, somewhat crackpot theory for what's gone wrong.

It's that America is suffering an infectious mental illness: an infectious version of psychopathy.

This disease is not caused by a pathogen (virus, bacterium, that sort of thing), but is spread by personal contact, and much faster, through the internet by means of text and images.

It opens you up to believing exactly what you choose to believe, rather than what's true, and it's my belief that the logical endpoint of believing only what you want to be true is, for some significant section of the populace, a psychopathic indifference to others.

And English-language speakers are far more prone to it, because English is the language of the Internet.

OK, it's a crazy theory, but it has both explicative and predictive value. It certainly explains how all my conservative friends flamed out of my life in a surprisingly short period in 2016.

For me, it predicted the non-reaction to the virus, and leads me to believe that there will be civil war if Trump loses (please, God, I don't ask you for very much given that I don't believe in you, but can you arrange that, please? Not the civil war part, the Trump loss, I mean.)

Ah, that got dark fast. It's dark times, I suppose.

If international travel ever starts up again and you find yourself in Amsterdam, allow us to purchase you foods and/or refreshing beverages!