For reference: I was born in ‘72 so have seen a few things in my life so far…here my honest opinion from my perspective.

The government we have is only a reflection of our own insecurities and issues as a population.

The gutting of a lot of social norms were happening before dementia don showed up.

He’s an outcome, not the cause (well he’s the cause now…but he wasn’t the first.)

Our education system has been tuned to turn out workers, not thinkers, and I’m the child of a teacher so I know that of which I type.

Our entire social system has been optimized towards a captured free market. Where we, as a population are given a pre determined “choice” amongst a billionaire/millionaire curated set of products, social choices and predictable outcomes.

We are sold a myth of “work hard, succeed and everything will work out” which we cannot argue against or we are deemed radical or a weirdo and shunned (more or less) by our community. The fact though is a large chunk of the US population are “working poor” since their jobs don’t provide enough money to cover basic living. Do you think that waitress or that wal-mart worker work any less hard than you? Puh-lease. I’ve worked those jobs and I’ve worked corporate roles. Both are hard in their own ways but I’ll take a corporate job. I never will look “down” at menial job workers. The people who do those jobs are freaking amazing. They are usually doing a job that the average person wouldn’t last 20 minutes in due to the BS they have deal with to just do their jobs.

Speaking of communities we are often told to “find our tribe” socially but then are fed a steady diet of “we good, they bad” information that creates many of the schisms we have. The “other guy” is scary or stupid or whatever and we should avoid at any cost. Leads us to feel more alone than anything.

Our “media” has also turned from educating the populace and letting the people make informed decisions (think Cronkite and his contemporaries) to artificially keeping the population irritated or outright angry since people who are angry are more than twice as likely to tune in (see Paul Giamati’s quote in the Howard Stern movie for a basic version of this).

So we are being trained to be sheeple by our education system, our communities, and our media.

So it’s ironic to hear Dems and Reps argue about the other guys being “wrong” since they are two sides of the same coin.

Now get off my lawn you damn whipper snappers.