You know that moment when you're loading groceries into your car and you see someone just leave their cart in an empty parking space? Or worse, watch it slowly roll toward someone's car? I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after watching a guy in the pouring rain push his cart all the way back to the corral. No one was watching. No reward waiting. Just him, getting soaked, doing what he thought was right.
The air feels heavier. And the struggles are changing shape. Beyond my office walls, the world is shifting, and my clients sense the tremors. The things they once trusted, global order, democratic norms, and even their own personal safety, no longer feel solid. They feel brittle, as if one strong wind could bring it all down. And what they're sensing isn't imagined.
This post is the second in a three-part series based on a 2023 qualitative study conducted by The Fund for Armenian Relief's (FAR's) Child Protection Center (CPC) to explore the psychological and social dynamics of forced displacement, using Armenia's integration of more than 115,000 displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) as a contemporary case study. In, we examined how displacement disrupts identity and belonging and efforts to understand the psychological impacts on both displaced individuals and host societies.
Purported Microsoft employees tried to get control of my computer by claiming it was about to self-destruct. (My husband almost fell for that one.) I got numerous realistic-sounding robocalls asking for donations to charities that probably don't exist. Women with lovely telephone voices claimed to have discovered my 2009 book of poems and told me their companies could make it a big commercial success.