Broadly agree.

Since retirement, I have felt like a kid in a candy store with all of the time I now have time for reading (and without the uneasy feeling that until I had entirely caught up on all of my journals and specialty updates, I had no business pleasure reading anyway). Last week I finally finished Marcus Aurelius.

But the closest analogy I've found to the current US historical current was around 400 years ago in England:

1) invalidate the existing (unstable) social/religious architecture (Henry VIII)
2) progressively debase what remains for a generation or two, then
3) wait a bit while things ripen, finally
3) allowing a vocal, hard-line, far-right conservative fringe to push over the whole structure (Roundheads)

which yielded
a) a number of years of a bloody mess with no one happy, leading to
b) a kind-of return to the old ways, and
c) a slow, gradual revision of those ways to be more endurable for the population - or at least a more durable power structure

And 1-4 above sound to me like the US in, say, 1968-2030

The only lesson I've pulled from this applicable to our current situation has been: if you tear something down without something else ready to take its place, it's not necessarily hopeless, but is probably going to be messily unhappy for some time.

--sutton
hoping to be more cheerful the next time