@MissKathleen
There is an old saying that democracies get the governments they deserve,
As a people the Americans elect leaders who undervalue the vocations and overpay the parasitic and useless, because the American people have in the last two decades allowed themselves to be corrupted to the point that they grew a cancer in their society of hate, fear, indolence, ignorance, decadence and paranoia, they have allowed a police force that had always been bad to rot to the point that it is so corrupt that it hires on the basis of prejudice and thuggery, rather than the ideal of protecting and serving.
You see the injustice of poverty and blame the victims for being lazy, you see injustice in the legal system and blame the victims for not being careful, you see injustice in the political system and call it strength.
You see injustice in innovation and you fear it because you worship conformity.
You worship celebrity to the point of deification, you allow the TV to be your guide and educator and give preference to the simple and easy to understand, to the version that best serves your interests or agrees with you and your, for want of a better word, philosophies.
Worst of all the American people have given in to the brainwashing of ultra capitalism, money is no longer the servant, the medium of exchange, it is the master, it is the stick beats you and the measure by which you judge all things and all people. You spend your life chasing it believing possessing it will make you "better" you spend it on wants rather than necessities and you villifie those who steal it UNLESS they steal enough of it to make them respectable again and then you make them your leaders viewing their willingness to "Do whatever it takes" as laudable.

We in the UK are going the same way, and will probably better the lesson and that makes me fear for the future, because unlike many I have learned from the past that empires fall when those in charge fail to learn two things
You cannot eat money and no matter how much of it you have it will never be of greater value to someone else as their child's life.

@MissKathleen
I used the word you in a purely abstract sense as in you the people, nothing was aimed directly at yourself, I know from your postings that you are in no way a part of the problem, but indeed is someone fighting for a restoration of the actual American ideal.