As an American, I have to say I agree and it is sad and frightening to see. It has been a long-time coming that the US has been getting more and more stagnant

As an American, I have to say I agree and it is sad and frightening to see. It has been a long-time coming that the US has been getting more and more stagnant and unable to do certain things. It's like we've been on a freighter headed for an iceberg, and the rudder is broken so we're all just watching it in slow motion. Look at infrastructure projects, healthcare, college costs, housing, global warming, etc. They've been obvious, impending issues for decades and we've just sat by and done nothing while they become bigger and bigger problems for more and more people. Still, at least in my opinion, America has continued to have a "superpower" of innovation in other, less constrained areas. Many of the brightest, most ambitious people in the world have continued to come here and do amazing things, as they have for the past century. And when things have been truly dire even fairly recently, like the '08 financial crisis or even 9/11, we've managed to take action and address it. In hindsight there were obviously major flaws to our responses to those things, but they were over-reactions rather than inaction, and were arguably still better than doing nothing (with the notable exception of the war in Iraq, but that had a lot of more complex causes and wasn't necessarily America's direct response to 9/11). For me personally, this is what makes the current moment so devastating to watch, and why I have started feeling like this time is different. We've had one of the top 5 biggest threats of American lives in all of history with Covid-19, and the federal response has been just ignoring it. On top of that, we're now going full steam ahead on shutting down or severely limiting immigration. That strikes me as just about the most idiotic, and profoundly un-American thing I can think of. These things take time to cause major shifts so I am hopeful we still have a couple of years to correct the course before the effects start to compound too much, but it feels like a particularly fragile time and the future could go either way at this point.