It was outside the United States that the dissonance struck most deeply.
I remember sitting on high-speed trains that glided so fast and silently they seemed to erase distance itself,
watching wind farms cross the horizon like silent fleets.
In country after country
— places far smaller and, on paper, far poorer than ours
— I kept asking the same question:
how could they manage to build what we could not?
Why did the richest nation on earth feel like it was living off the leftovers of its mid-twentieth century optimism? 

Conversations in Europe added another layer.
People spoke casually of health care as a right, not a privilege;
of sending their children to university without dread or debt;
of a shared obligation to slow the warming planet.
It was not utopia
— just an older, steadier faith in the public good.
The idea that freedom and mutual responsibility might coexist had not yet been driven out of their political imagination. 

Back home, the contrast was impossible to ignore.
We stumble on crumbling bridges and argue about the price of insulin
yet never question why nearly two-thirds of what Washington calls “discretionary spending” is locked inside the machinery of the National Security State.
In the 2026 budget,
-- 59.6 percent is marked for the Pentagon
(even more if Trump succeeds in getting an additional $600 billion),
-- another 6.4 percent for Homeland Security.

No other democracy has made such choices
— or lived so comfortably with their consequences. 
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-america-military-industrial-iran-war-1235524970/