America is conflicted with regard to "Free Speech."

 America is conflicted with regard to "Free Speech."  On the one hand we believe that it is the critical foundation of our democracy and, on the other hand, we see it to be difficult to accept any speech that we find unpleasant.  Nowhere in modern America do we see a conversation in depth about any issue.  Twitter/X claims to do this, but insists on severely limiting the depth of the conversation to sound bites that convince no one of the legitimacy of any thought.  There is no channel of communication that permits, repeat permits, let alone encourages, an honest exchange of views on any subject of importance.  All we have are sound bites, memes, cliches, and pronunciations combined with the attention span of a nit.  At community level the principal tool used to deny free speech is the need to be polite.  This is the same naïveté that insists that wars must follow the rules, and people must be nice to each other.

I see this utter stupidity, combined with a severe case of wishful thinking, to be the reason that we are burdened with inadequate leadership.  Our various politicians struggle to make speeches that appeal to mindless voters rather than adequately addressing the various issues that plague society and threaten our place in the world.  The root problem is us, not them, but that intellectual burden is too heavy for us to bear, and we will continue to blindly swirl down the sewer of life instead.  At some point in the process, one or another of our foreign adversaries will mismanage one or another of their disagreements with us and we will stumble into a war with another nuclear power.  Whomever wins that war will inherit an already overpopulated planet that will have been seriously damaged in its ability to feed the human community by the very conflict that gave them their hegemony.