Magic Medicines for the Ills of Centaurs and Mermaids

One quality the recent Covington High School fiasco highlighted about the country is how much of the intense reactions in the country are to intense problems that do not exist. A silent, stoic (and probably confused) teenage boy becomes not a symbol but rather a Rorschach Test. The Great American Problem is.....(you fill in the blank).....

But there are some truths, regardless of belief. The country has 3.9% unemployment; that is astonishingly good. Poverty has been declining and middle incomes have been increasing since 2013. Jobs are everywhere. Median household income reached $61,372 in 2017, which is higher than comparable countries like Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Denmark, and exceeded only by a handful of tiny oil-rich or banking nations like Norway, Switzerland and Lichtenstein. U.S. median household size, meanwhile, has declined, so individual wealth has increased even more than the income numbers reflect.
Economic revolution, regardless of how satisfying to one's bloodlust, does not make much sense.
On the other side of the popular alarmism, immigration apprehensions at the border are at an eighteen year low, illegals have a lower crime rate than native or naturalized citizens, immigration has not caused job loss but automation has, and globalization has diverted some low-level jobs overseas but supplied cheap goods which has raised the standard of living even further.
But there are problems. We have had mediocre leaders--some heartfelt, some cynical--but all mediocre. Our political debates rest on fantasies so our solutions are fantastic, too. We will turn to technologies that do not exist by taxing people who do not exist. We have fueled a lot of our success with unsustainable debt. For a people with suspicions about domestic government built into our constitutional DNA, we are remarkably confident in our ability to create benign and powerful governments for foreign nations. And our sensibilities have followed our technology: All our beliefs have progressed from analog to binary. Everything is Black or White.
We have become an intense, incautious people.