I watched a lot of movies when it was rainy and cold last week and I noticed the movies I picked were ones that looked like they had happy endings.

Like a lot of folks, I need to watch or read or hear those stories that remind us that life can be good and that at the end of the story, it’s possible for a crazy couple to reunite, or for the wayward singer to get a second chance, or for the dog to find its way home.

I’m just yearning for happy.

Are you happy out there? Because I don’t know what to say to my daughter who says feeding her boys now costs $300 a week or more, and that doesn’t include the things that used to make a week special: a gallon of ice cream, a box of cake mix and a can of frosting. When she was a toddler, and all the way up through her high school years, my weekly food bill was $125, just $25 more than it was for my parents when they shopped for me thirty years before.

The things we used to count on, like stable food prices, are not things we can count on anymore. My daughter was barely past the gates of childhood moving into adulthood when the new world was thrust upon her like a speeding train barreling down the tracks. A rent hike, then tutoring her boys at home through the pandemic, and trying to keep the lights on while working two jobs. She worries she’ll never be able to buy a home.

Corporations invested billions in real estate in the past few years. According to a Wall Street Journal report, BlackRock – led by billionaire Laurence Fink – purchased entire neighborhoods and converted single-family homes into rentals; while in cities like Houston, investors like Fink account for one-quarter of the home purchasers. Should corporations be allowed to toy with the American housing market, once one of the most stable enterprises in our country? Should they be able to obliterate supply and keep prices high?

Many of those houses bought by Blackrock sit empty now, or are rented to families at exhorbitant prices. But no one wants to talk about that. No one wants to talk about anything negative. It’s the new American motto: “Let’s just pretend nothing unpleasant is going on.”

Can’t you tell when you bring up an unpleasant truth in a crowd that everyone looks away, or changes the subject? That’s because everything has been politicized, and we’ve always been taught not to discuss politics in polite company. But since when is the topic of feeding your family nutritious food a political discussion and not an economic one? Or a commentary on society as a whole? Ask someone you know today how food prices are effecting their family. Have that conversation. Ask them if they’re doing okay.

No one seems to have a good answer about why the cost of things are so high. No one is explaining high prices in a way that makes sense to the average person. And yet, these are incredibly important topics and we should be discussing them all of the time–out for a beer with friends, over the dinner table, at the kid’s ball game. And while you’re at it, talk about anything that strikes you as strange, or unAmerican, or ridiculous. Because my concern is that we’ve just stopped talking to one another and have, without protest, allowed our American life to be dumped on its head. Divided, confused, lied to–whatever. It’s time to put those things aside and start talking to one another again. Because once we come together, we are a force to be reckoned with.

Let’s start that conversation. Write to me about how food prices are effecting your family, or how the cost of housing has altered your dream, or you’re worried for your children’s future. I’m opening the conversation. I’m listening. It’s time we all started listening to one another again. We just need to start talking to each other first.