To those who try to take others down with them because they have given up...

[HughBeaumont]

10. Our spirit and pluck isn't the problem.

The dwindling amount of avenues necessary for serious change, particularly economic change, are America's problem.

I think in the past 20 years, we've made giant strides in societal change, and we continue to do so. Part of that is the growing rejection of the Fundamentalist right's patriarchal social agenda, driven by the revisit of the figures you mentioned; we're not governing our lives on Bible literalism any longer.

It's economic change that America particularly sucks at, and that's not really in our control anymore.

When you have an economic and human system where a person's success is almost entirely tethered to how gainfully they're employed, THAT's a major problem.

When the cost of economic necessities (education, health care, housing, transportation, food, etc) continually outpaces the middle/working/poor's ability to pay them with a wage that hasn't risen in real dollars since 1979, THAT's a major problem.

America by and large is still under the spell of Reaganomics and Horatio Alger. America is still in love with the counterproductive ideas of "rugged individualism", "laissez-faire", "Trickle Down", "austerity" . . . this is a recipe for disaster, and it's apparent that no one in the public or private sector is going to help right this toxic path.

Hard as it is to believe, we're being run by people who seem to think there's nothing wrong with introducing conditions that leads to economic collapse 90% of the time.

If we're not vigilant, we're not going to prosper. Change can only happen when you know what it is that NEEDS to change.