I asked myself this Q the other day: "What keeps a country together?"

For me, the answer was caring about each other and building bonds across communities. What I have seen instead in the history of this country since the 1980's is a mass-culture of trying to make as much money as possible to live your best life and give your kids their best lives--even if it is at the expense of other members of society. That's how we got a nation of individuals and families going it their own way instead of citizens trying to advance the nation. That's how we got a broken meritocracy that revolves around money and which schools you came from instead of true talent. That's how we got The Big Sort and geographic political polarization. That's how we got runaway wealth inequality and a broken economic ladder. That's why nobody is fixing it. Capitalism and the rat race for riches gave us an unequal society, and why fix an unequal society when you're on top? Why not just keep that exploitation going? It basically guarantees that your kids don't have to run as fast when it's their turn to enter the rat race. Imagine a game of Texas Hold Em where the players doing the best can buy aces from the dealer with their profits when they don't have a hand they like. That's the unequal economy we're living in. That's the exploitation we're living under.

If the country is full of individuals, and the individuals doing best are of a "fuck it, I've got mine" attitude at scale, then this country is destined for civil war, plain and simple. And I've seen what happens to the well-off families during civil wars. Their neighbors kill them for their money. Think there are homicide investigations during civil wars? There aren't. Not even when there's a central government in control. The bodies just get chalked up as another political killing, nothing more. The folks who have it good in this country ought to think real hard about that as we move into increasingly-unstable political territory as a country. Foreign wars work out great for the rich (their profit shares increase), but civil wars do not.