As the political environment starts to tip the Richter scale, I find we’re just scratching the surface. We’d love to measure the struggle of the common man, or any animal for that matter; prove the meaning in all the hardships and struggles we face. A Mohs scale, if you will, for the hardness of a person. Instead of measuring the resistance to scratches a mineral can withstand, a measure for the amount one is torn away by adversarial interaction.

We all know how it goes… Try convincing a blind man of the beauty a sunset holds.

It takes nuance, empathy and understanding. Both parties must make an effort to communicate. Instead we impose our beliefs on others relentlessly. Be it nihilistic compliance, inspired rebellion, insidious hatred, or anything else, we can’t help but leak onto each other. An attempt to erode the foundations of our enemies. So we all build levees, and it’s the hardest that last the longest.

Hardness gets portrayed as a very masculine concept. It’s attached to physical strength, sweat, and blood. But that’s not really it at all. Hardness is a stoic resolve. It’s the confidence to argue with someone you don’t agree with, and the humility to admit when you’re wrong. It’s the ability to simply remain in the face of adversity. While it may manifest as physical strength, often the aspect of hardness is the Ego itself.

Culture binds these relationships together like gravity to planets. Unlike gravity however, our culture(s) makes baseless choices in fashion all too often, and are always changing. We live in a fractured world, in the aftermath of a cultural earthquake. Each day a new aftershock.

All this pressure builds diamonds, the hardest gems. Too hard; they hold more power than they ever should, bloodied and soaked in the tears of countless detractors. Meanwhile the sandstone dissolves quickly into sand. Sand that embeds itself into every nook and cranny, imposing a distinctive friction on everything. A malignant force, that leaves a mark.

But together the sand can be molded into castles, or melted into windows, or even engineered into computers. And it feels like there’s more sand caught between my toes after a day at the beach than diamonds on the entire earth.