America is just a big adolescent.....

[jhrobbins]

And this seems to explain a lot to me , anyway. We are, in fact, going through our adolescence in comparison to the rest of the world. It also explains why we, like some rough, pimply faced 17 year old seem to have all of the answers and not wanting to have to explain ourselves. We are self absorbed, concerned primarily about our own needs and desires and our solutions to problems are overly simplistic.

Now I know that this is overly simplistic as well. We have ostensibly gone through periods in our brief history where we did not act like adolescents - in fact, we were anything but. It just seems that after WWII, Americans came home from the war and tried to make everything better for their kids (me) and in so doing, took away some of our frame of reference for the ills of the rest of the world. We were so insulated that we were able to revert to selfish adolescent pursuits. The comparison to real adolescence is often chilling to me. And yet, like our parents that loved us through this difficult time, the rest of the world - the western world anyway, sort of pats us on our heads and realize that we will come out of it sooner or later and hope that we don't tear up the living room or wreck the car in the process.

[ChicagoRonin]

1. A friend's wife put it this way . . .

The United States (and an unfortunate majority of its people) has become like the character of Biff Tannen from "Back to the Future."
The respone to everything is, "What are you looking at, butt-head."

BTW, my friend and his wife work in secondary school education in Toledo, to give things context.

[Poll_Blind]

2. It is a culture of entitlement. America has serious entitlement issues.

PB

[LSparkle]

3. More like an angry toddler -- with his finger on the nuke button