The importance of societal unity.

 The single most dangerous threat to our future is the deterioration of our societal unity.  Without societal unity we can not resolve any of the specific political issues that are front and center.  The America that I was born into was much different than the one that I live in today.  There was friction between different groups, but we were trying to eliminate it.  The American melting pot sought to eliminate ethnic differences and "dial two for Spanish" did not exist.  Sink or swim, a newcomer to America had to adapt to the dominant mongrel culture.  Today, we seek to elevate our ethnic differences and champion diversity.  Diversity in every form possible to imagine, including gender.  A Democrat sees every single issue and the political landscape differently than does his/her/its Republican neighbor because he, or she, or it, is a Democrat, not because of any real substantive difference.  Republicans do precisely the same thing for the same inane "reason."

At the same time, we increasingly isolate ourselves from what is happening at ground level throughout the rest of the world.  One of the things that worries me the most is that humans are perfecting weapon technology faster than our societal structures are capable of dealing with it.  Always before, humans fell into conflict, killed, wounded and destroyed much, but eventually one side or the other prevailed. Because of "advances" in technology, each of the conflicts grew in intensity and reach, but all eventually ended with one side dominant.  During my lifetime, the seminal conflict was Word War II and America emerged as the dominant leader of the entire world, but was increasingly challenged by the Soviet Union.  I was a small part of the defeat of the Soviet challenge to our leadership and stupidly thought that the international threat to America had been eliminated and we could all get on with our "normal" lives.  

Meanwhile the art of war has morphed away from industrial conflict, where airplanes, tanks and artillery dominated land battles between huge groups of humans, toward nuclear war, where huge numbers of nuclear tipped ballistic missiles will be fired from underground silos at urban centers half way around the world and cyber war will take out electrical grids and the cyber underpinnings of civilization in the enemy nation.  Satellites have become more important than seaports and railroads.   Meanwhile, we, here in America, have become complacent about what is going on in the rest of the world, focusing instead on our own precious navel.  We worry about the danger to our democracy, while refusing to participate in it intelligently.  Our tribal differences dominate what passes for thought throughout the nation and we worry about "issues" that we can understand - the age of the fetus, the proper use of pronouns, the price of gasoline, the number of chips in the bag, and our precious feelings.  Crooks and charlatans "lead" us and we put up with it because we are too busy minding our own business.  Our "understanding" of the world around us is derived from our television sets and our phones.  We are purposely ignorant of the world that we live in and think that we can build a fence that will protect us from what is happening outside of our non-existent borders.  We are stupid beyond belief and arrogant enough to honestly believe that we are not.