It should be noted that there is an observable correlation between the shrinking of socially maintained publicly accessible third spaces for all ages and the increases in minor abuse reported.
With the invention of online meeting places becoming accessible to society's children, people allowed the maintenance of places where children and the vulnerable could learn life preserving skills, take refuge or seek help, even from each other, dissipate.
This is why libraries and parks, some of the last barely permissible third spaces, are so vital to our rapidly destabilizing society. They are not just books. They are not just trees. They are refuges for the needy, the damned and the vulnerable. Things our contemporary society treats as personal failings and publicly discriminates against behind a facade of "making things great again". In some avenues and red light wall street districts, it doesn't even hide, consumerism and monopoly actively discourage them from existing. Hierarchal models dribble them to the bottom most rungs, for "their" benefit.
In a world where society values, but doesn't actively, actionably, unhesitatingly, encouragingly love it's children and aims to do better for them by putting their inflated egos and inflamed traumas aside, there can be no future for them.
Only an endless repetition of now.
But now is all we've got.
S what can we do, right now, to break the loop, in the million ways it needs to be rerouted?
Don't look at the million.
Start with the one. Love.
Move to the two. Manage your ego, manage your trauma. Practice vulnerability, become humble. Encourage trust, begin with the self.
Notice what you can do to help the small things. Learn about both your strengths and weaknesses and how they are one and the same.
Stepping stone it up to change. Lay your inflated ego aside again, the one that says an action or result is not "big" enough, "good" enough. Yes it is. Change is change.
Community and social change starts with the self, and then is refracted outwards. A myriad of colours and bouncing beams.
If you want to see love, be love.