OPINIONS

The problem in America is that we cannot resolve our cognitive dissonance. Broadly speaking, one could attribute this to political parties but this is a generalization that doesn't really help nor grasp the issue. The Republicans I encounter are not any more or less intelligent or jumpy as the Democrats, and frequently they do have genuine concerns about policy that could be incredibly important to the nation. Democrats, likewise, focus on an entirely separate set of issues, but get cried down or go unconsidered simply because of their affiliation.
The Falsity of this Dichotomy is sadly lost on the majority of those arguing. The line is drawn in the sands for relatively arbitrary reasons; Obama is objectively better than Romney in the same way that Knowing Compliance is better than Belligerent Ignorance. It doesn't necessarily make it okay, just very much the lesser of two evils. But what so many fail to recognize is that it is merely replacing one cog in a vast machine; an important, visible cog, but only one part of the overall machine. What is even more difficult to grasp is the tenuous balance between war and peace.
60 years ago, America helped beat back the last really credible threat the world has known. Before that, every nation mostly kept to themselves and distrusted if not actively despised their neighbors. War is consistent, an artifact of our lives; none of us have been alive while a war has not been occurring somewhere in the world. Even now, the argument could be made that, despite however far we have come in peace and understanding, we are one good excuse away from armed conflict with other nations.
In this connected world, however, the single most burning question that our government seems unable to ask themselves is "is this necessary?". I've grown up downloading japanese porn, pirating russian cam movies, using canadian software and cussing out brazilian video gamers all the while on a mess of tech built in Korea and subsidized by China. Nations draw invisible lines that dictate acceptable behavior,  but how much is my nation worth to me when all my friends, family members, and acquaintances are criminals in some form?
Drug use, improper licensing, piracy, trading in formerly protected knowledge, violating trademark patents under vaguely defined fair use laws, illegal u-turns, ripping the tags off mattresses, jaywalking. That that list sounds a little absurd belies the issues at hand; all my friends are drug dealers. All my Politicians are Corrupt Liars of some flavor or another, all my bosses operate on some kind of desperate hope that their bosses don't actually find out what the fuck they're doing. It's this binary nature of crime, this punishment society that causes an almost schizophrenic split in the national consciousness.
The vast majority of criminals are not monsters; they're people the system has failed. We want to say that ever Killer is a monster; but in most cases, they're just kids, just some guy or gal, doing their job, doing the only job available to them in low-income environments. We wouldn't prosecute one of our Soldiers in this manner, despite the fact that "Killer" is just as much in a Soldiers' job description, if not more so than a drug dealer. And in every such case, people turn to the only avenues available to them; crime. Not even violent crime. The Mafia in Italy now function as the garbage people for graft. This is simply because the Italian government is so broke that they cannot employ trashmen. Are the Mafia's policies destructive and heading towards ruin? Yeah, but they're stepping up to provide a public service that isn't being fulfilled. If they had a better option, they'd take it; they don't.
And that is what is happening to America right now; we're raising a nation of criminals. And we're raising a nation of criminals precisely because we have this deep, overriding, media directed fear of being "bad". And "bad" is really this artificial concept. There's no real good or evil in the world, there is only complex motivation. I don't want to impugn any of the religious reading, but it is worth noting that this is an extrapolated ideological effect of Abrahamic religion.  You are a good person and everyone around you is a good person because you all follow the rules (or pretend to) and that should be the end of it.
But this has two harmful effects that are not immediately apparent. 1. Everybody who doesn't follow the rules is "bad".  This isolates and stagnates the social group while making it hostile towards anyone it perceives as an "other". The worst part is that sometimes it is not even a malicious hostility; perverse as it sounds, the suggestion of a Christian towards a Gay person that to accept Jesus will be to absolve one of the "sin" of Gayness is, well, born from a place of good intentions. Nevermind that it's an answer looking for a question; sexual orientation as we know now is not a choice, and the very notion that it can be "cured" is offensive to anyone not possessing an irrational fear of gay people. But in the quest to do good, you alienate the very people you seek to help by only telling them what you think the problem is, and not actually attempting to understand that person or the problem.
The 2nd problem is intermingled with the first; there is no attempt to understand, and this leaves a moral grey area a lot of people are purposefully blind to. So long as you are "good", whatever crimes you commit aren't really that criminal because you have still obeyed the moral rules. Nevermind that those rules do not actually determine "crime"; beating that gay person wasn't a crime, you're a devout catholic, how could it be? Embezzling all those funds wasn't a crime, you don't do drugs. Calling the President a N****r isn't a crime, you're just expressing your freedom of speech.
None of these reasons have anything to do with the crime, and everything to do with personal justification for horrible actions. It's a Disconnect; "Fix our school systems! Don't teach our kids that evolution crap!", "The government will take away our guns! But we want these lone nutjob attacks to stop!", "America is the Free-est country in the world! Brought to you by Robot Missiles and Outsourced Labor!".
Our revolutionary agenda world-wide has been oppression based on this ideal morality while our media both condemns and glorifies sex and violence and crime and basically everything they don't want us to do. You know what the most hilarious thing about Afghanistan is? The Opium. They stack that shit high as the roof of their poor little house goes; Poppies are their biggest cash crop. And all our soldiers over there can't bat an eyelid at it. Why? Well, take away the biggest source of non-violent income for a majority of the population, and suddenly, they have reason to shoot at you. We touch the Dope and suddenly we wouldn't have an organization to deal with, we'd have a nation. Who do they sell the Opium to? Well, they don't sell it only to us, but our entire illegal supply comes more or less from that region (some of our legal stuff too I think). And for all our efforts otherwise, America is the most drugged out nation in the world.
	We cannot enforce our own Revolutionary Agenda abroad because it would invalidate any goodwill we have actually earned from these people. At the same time, our very nation  violates our supposed "Revolutionary Agenda" the most out of any nation in the world, despite any efforts whatsoever to halt it. 20th Century America has been involved in a Prohibition of 100 years regarding addictive chemicals, and while not all of these chemicals have the same effects, what they all share is a lack of effective treatment for serious addicts, general misconception about the causes and reasoning of addiction, a steadiness of employment (in a way) even once one gets out of prison, and they have all persisted in usage despite laws against them. Fuck, we take shit away and someone figured out how to make meth using aspirin and gatorade. Meth is goddamn epidemic because Walmarts are goddamn epidemic.
	The more we as a nation try and enforce these policies of punishment, the more schizophrenic we as a nation become. There are real monsters out there; people like Eric Harris. But they are so few and far in-between as to be anomalous; there is almost no way to predict such an assault. Even if we were to arm every teacher in every classroom of every school in America, the chances of one of those guns disrupting a mass shooting is so infinitesimally small as to be insignificant in any kind of Cost-Benefit analysis.
	But as we tighten the thumbscrews upon knowledge and understanding, we punish the wrong people and that makes us hated and untrustworthy. And the question is, should we really be punishing anyone?