Scoping

IN AMERICA WE set up such steep, rigid social hierarchies of various sorts, we encourage people so strongly to seek to ascend them, we fill the ascent with so many obstacles, we determine the successful ascendants so arbitrarily and unfairly, reward those who successfully ascend so lavishly, and so summarily dismiss those who do not, that Americans are, generally speaking, ambitious, vain,arrogant, competitive, bitter, angry, and alienated. A witches brew of conflicting characteristics. This creates difficulties. it all begins in grade school when, trapped for hours daily in a relatively small room with twenty nine other people, we steadily learn about the others, form comparisons, and hence, social pecking orders. Who among us Americans in third grade failed to compose a list of our "ten best friends"? By third grade, we are learning to do things like that, to think in those terms. Ah, those halcyon days of clique formation. May they never cease. Of course, they never do. First, we plow and compete our way through school, whether the teachers encourage competition or not. Applying for jobs, joining the military, finding a mate, a job, and all that, all highly hierarchical pursuits in these, the United States of Atomization, of freedom and liberty. America is a class based culture with innumerable classes, as many classes, nearly, as there are members.This fact is contrary to the once popular myth that we the american people have created a classless, completely free society, without penalty for individual differences. The penalty thereby becomes exclusion, which means successlessness. What all these cultural characteristics add up to is a very angry, agitated society replete with all manner of violence,including, importantly, in entertainment. There are more guns in America than there are Americans, but fortunately, most of them are in being hoarded by a few extremists, and are therefore redundant, if nothing else. Under current conditions, gun violence and mass murder in America will not only not go away, it will only increase. Fundamental change is hard as hell, but often vital.