Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Ah, what a time to be alive, yeah?

I have a friend who always says one of two things.

First is, things are going badly.

I wish I'd never been born.

And the second one is, if things are going well, what a time to be alive.

I kind of feel both ways.

Like, things are looking really weird, but it's such a time to be alive, right?

Like the history of now, we're going to look back on this.

If there's us to look back, you don't know. Anyway,

the situation is volatile and unprecedented in the world in various ways. I mean, I'm glad

we've got vaccines coming for COVID. It appears we're going to have a peaceful transition

of power in the United States this week, but still, we had like a coup attempt on the Capitol building and more people are more Americans now, almost as many Americans, have died from COVID as died in World War II. So it's not, not optimal in certain ways. And because of that, a lot of people are

triggered. And as you know, if you live on the internet at all, triggered means that you have something

in your past that you feel bad about. Like, say you were deeply humiliated by your great uncle who had bright red hair.

Later in your life, if you get into an argument with someone who happens to have red hair,

you might get triggered because of the unheeled issues with that uncle, and your reaction will be very strong. So right now, so many of us are getting

triggered about so many things. And it's very difficult to know what to say. Like going online like

this, I talk to other people I know who live by presenting or writing or doing whatever. And we're

all sort of saying, how do I avoid

the landmines? How do I avoid triggering like everyone with every word I say? And I started to think

...