The wedding and most of the family part were wonderful and very much worth the expense and effort. As these are personal I will keep them to myself. However, what we saw in public in CT stunned us and I will share it with you. It is literally a sick society: churning on anger, busyness, a lust for money and the envy of not having enough of it. I saw so many old people and so few children. I saw so many sick people: physically dying or with hollow eyes of the drugged or those lost in their traumatized fetishes. Lines everywhere. Lines in the endless traffic. Lines in every store. Signs everywhere pitching products or politics. Huge fascistic block long signs in front of the Community Health Services in Middletown promoting certain groups based on immutable characteristics (and very much excluding those not presented). Signs in front of so many churches promoting secular division or unbiblical teachings. I listened to conversations in stores, on the streets, at parties, and on the media and it was nearly all consumed with politics or current events with the glaze of Cathedral agit prop. And almost all of it on the edge of rage for "the other". Fronting in speech. Fronting in manner. Fronting so as not to stick out in any way from the herd. So much fear. What I am not saying is that humans are not going to human in other places. The full scope of our fallen world is always with us wherever we are. What I am saying is that we saw a rather terminal state of a society, and it was a shocking sight to see. It reminds me of an image from a roadrunner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote has just ran off of a cliff. His momentum- and not looking down- keep him moving forward on thin air. That is where the society we saw is. We know what happens when he looks down, as is inevitable.