Americans are pissed about a lot of the things we see around us, yet we also have a political system that, were all of us involved, would likely provide the mea

Americans are pissed about a lot of the things we see around us, yet we also have a political system that, were all of us involved, would likely provide the means to fix many of those things. If you ask an American about, say, the problem of homelessness they will tell you it is awful, and there are more people living in tents, and etc. etc. But, the overwhelming majority of people will not lift a finger to get involved in either nonprofit or public-sector solutions in any meaningful hands-on way. So, we're upset about everything and simultaneously unwilling to put in a collective effort to fix any of it (even though we know we could if we really tried - we were raised on the idea of American exceptionalism after-all). I think that produces a sort of cognitive dissonance throughout the population. We know these problems are tractable, we know we're capable of solving them, but we also know we're not going to do a damn thing about them. The origins of the cognitive dissonance can perhaps can be attributed to the strong mythologic narrative of individualism in the country running up against the erosion of community, the income gap, the increasing complexity of the problems we face, and the inadequacy of out K-12 education system to prepare students to function competitively in the 21st century.