Since my wife and kid jumped on, I’ve been playing the Pokemon, just like so many other Americans. We’ve been having fun. It’s added a little bit of novelty to my bike rides (and it’s helped me start getting back into the regular bike riding habit, which is good for me), and I’ve met a bunch of pleasant folks out wandering.

It’s kind of neat being on the forefront of the national zeitgeist.

It’s a “get out and explore” activity, and while I think the “fitness” angle is a little overplayed, that’s definitely a benefit for a lot of people. It’s social, but it works for myriad values of “social”. You can play it solo, like I tend to do on my rides, or you can do the mass group activity thing like all the folks in some of the parks in the city (I hear some of the hip 20somethings are organizing a huge Pokemon themed bar crawl before the month is out). Even on my little jaunts through Dutch Gap for the trails or a quick five miler to the library and back, I find myself getting into pleasant conversations with other players, sharing tips about where the good stuff is, or just griping about server issues. It’s been fun.

The question a lot of people have about this phenomenon (and I guess it is a phenomenon at this point) took off while others, like geocaching, or Ingress, the previous GPS-enabled phone game Niantic (the Pokemon game developer) put out, and serves as the basis for a lot of the geographical data for Pokemon, remained niche activities?

I have a theory.

This game came out toward the end of one of the most awful, divisive, and all-around crappy weeks in recent American memory, smack-dab in the middle of a year full of divisiveness, tragedy, and political division. People were tired of feeling desperate, tired, angry, and isolated from their neighbors. America needed some harmless, mindless, non-controversial entertainment and diversion. Wandering around in the sunshine (the fact that the weather was beautiful all over the place this weekend helped) catching little cartoon monsters was exactly the kind of thing people needed.

Yep, I said it: Pokemon Go, this past weekend, was the thing that united America, at least for a little while; a fortuitously-timed trifle that gave America the therapeutic salve it needed exactly when it needed it the most.