Nice observation and self-reflection. One additional layer I observe for the last 25 years with increasing concern is the lack of community. America seems to become more and more a place of individual freedoms. That’s great but only part of what a successful and sustainable system needs. We don’t take things seriously until they directly affect us — that’s true for health issues like Covid, nutrition and associated obesity or diabetes, climate and the impact on our utility bills, guns, and police brutality — until we are getting stopped and mishandled, and on and on and on.

We like to talk in the abstract of individual freedom and America's form of democracy, but when it comes to real actions, changes in behaviors or world views, we are strong individual deniers until the very last moment — when we are directly affected. It’s our form of insanity and probably at some point the demise of our system in the United States.