From our earliest days as a colony and then as a country, the United States: • suffered rampant mistrust among the regions and colonies, and then among the states, • was founded on the pillars of racial, ethnic, gender, and class discrimination and exploitation, • conferred status, privilege, and power only on old, wealthy, white, property-holding men, • valued capital and property over people and labor, • mistrusted and protected itself from true, direct, popular democracy, • devalued mass public education and utilized the resultant ignorance as a social and economic instrument, • favored violence over diplomacy as an everyday political, economic, and social tool, • espoused a narrow, rigid, cruel form of Christianity, and • prized individualism and greed over community and shared responsibility. And the US is still exactly like that. What ye sow in the spring, ye shall reap in the fall.