As to the title of this thread: Peter, I have to disagree. America was one of the greatest ideas humans ever came up with. If you live there, speaking as a Canadian, I will tell you just how fortunate you are. You have vast wealth--incredibly vast. That it is not shared as equally as maybe it should be (IMO) is something for y'all to work on. BUT, at least you can do that there. Many places all yad get is a piece of lead in your skull delivered by some government sonuvabitch with a rifle. Do bad things happen there? Yes, they do. Do you have the freedom to do something about it? Yes, you do. Peter, go fix the problem. Find like-minded people and change the way your country is. Get back the idea of responsible government--make the bastards see that they are responsible to the electorate and every single individual that lives in a country most citizens of the world can only dream about living in. I know there are faults. Hell, YES there are faults. Many of them egregious, wrong, ugly. FIX them.