This is one of his main points and it's a very important one.

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again last night and, since it's been probably 20 years since the last time, I was struck by how far we've fallen and how pathetic we've become as a people.

We no longer strive to achieve great things, we just grub around looking for fictitious symbols of debt as if they are of any substance. Sure, we got out of our gravity well for a minute and we littered the moon a little, but Clark wrote his book by looking at how far we advanced in the forty-some prior years and extrapolating that same pace forty-some years into the future.

My great grandmother (1881 - 1980) was born in a sod house with a hand-pumped well and an outhouse and saw the advent of electricity, flight, workers rights, women’s suffrage, space flight, the civil rights act, networks of paved roads, skyscrapers, cars, computers, the double helix, fatal diseases eradicated, the ability to produce enough food to end hunger, telephones, refrigeration, moving pictures, talkies, unions, radio, television, atomic power, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and a thousand other things we don't even imagine living without.

Do you think any of us will see anything that even approaches that kind of progress? I'm at least half done with my life and the greatest advances I've seen are computer networks and propaganda being elevated to a science.

the cusp of this nation's most critical junction since the Civil war.

As a small child I grew up in a nation of hope and opportunity. Watching man set foot on the moon is one of my very earliest memories. As a teenager, I saw this nation make a specific, deliberate choice to turn its back on the future and embrace a fantasy created by the most bankrupt, evil men on earth, and here's the most important part, I saw tens of millions of people that absolutely knew full well that what was being done was pure evil, and they went along with it for the chance that they could get rich along the way. They sold their souls and our future for a BMW and a 3-piece suit. They turned their backs on their fellow human beings and ignored their suffering and deprivation.

Since then I have watched this nation literally disintegrate, while most of those around me developed the capacity to purposely blind themselves to what was happening all around them.

It permeates this site and DU is, believe it or not, better than the overall reality. Small, mean, minds that take a perverse pleasure in making everything that they can influence, worse.

The racism, bigotry, the NRA, all that you mentioned and much more are merely symptoms of the underlying cancer that is consuming us all. America is the embodiment of evil in the world today.