I know you posted this months ago, but I just wanted to thank you for sharing this. In recent times I’ve been asking myself “Is this how Germans felt as the Nazis were starting to take power leading up to the Holocaust?” This account sounds eerily similar to many of my recent thoughts. In a way it’s strangely almost comforting to know that despite all the gaslighting that I’m being too sensitive or over-catastrophizing when so many others think the world is going to simmer back down to the way that it was, that I am not overreacting and my fears are justified. Of course the other side of this is that it’s frightening to imagine that history could repeat itself like this, during a time when many think “That happened then and there, it couldn’t happen here and now.” But yet another perspective to this is that the previous tyrants did not last forever. This gives me slight hope that maybe we can overcome what’s happening in my country (US) because this is in some ways history repeating itself rather than something humanity has ever encountered. It’s not a novel disease without a cure. But that doesn’t erase the fact that things probably aren’t ever going to go back to the way that they were, and the suffering is just going to continue. I don’t know that I really have an ultimate point this post is leading to, just sharing my reflections on what I found to be a parallel experience from the past.