How strange the way customs rise and reshape us. Some years feel like being carried away in an undertow, the world no longer recognizable and drifting away. Others are like long midday naps. We wake up disoriented, unsure of time and place, disheveled. Was the slumber five minutes or five hours?
People of power burn to change laws, to force others to bend to their will. But people move at the oddest turns. A new phrase, a meme, a rising cultural icon, all can change behavior more dramatically than edicts and mandates.
Culture rewards and punishes with equal glee. It loves to destroy, but at the strangest time to rescue as well. Its consciousness arises from a place no one has seen and no one will shape. It will have the final word on everyone, big or small, oligarch or migrant.