There is a lot of heat here, but not much light.

Why are we a mess? Maybe America is humanity crashing up against the edge of the global petri dish, after a hundred thousand years of, 'go forth and multiply.'

We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical reciprocal, feedback generated reality.

It's very easy to point fingers and run around shrieking, given lots of people seem to be doing that, but what are the lessons we will have learned, when the dust does settle?

Consider that a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the many details of which we are aware.

So one of the reasons we can't have a live and let live world is because everyone thinks their vision of reality should be universal, rather than unique. There are certainly fundamentalists all over the world, not just in America.

We do have a consumer culture, where every want, need, impulse, desire is magnified and glorified, in order to sell something, from products to political movements. No one ever got rich or powerful by arguing for restraint. So we are greedy and short sighted, but maybe the only way people really learn the hard lessons is to go overboard. It's like we're born thinking we know everything and spend our lives learning otherwise.

We are squandering much, but in a thousand years, we might reach heights that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

I suspect humanity is more towards the end of the beginning, than the beginning of the end.