When did we lose our way? Was it the two world wars that did for us?

To have lost our way implies that there was a way, that we knew what it was and that we were willingly following it. I doubt there would be general consensus on any of those.

If by losing our way, you mean losing the "American ideals" that we once held dear....i challenge you to tell me when they truly existed. From what I can see, we've all been told about how America is the land of opportunity and freedom....the land of the free and home of the brave. Yet if you take an honest look at our history, that freedom and opportunity has only ever been extended to a select few. Every ethic group has been discriminated against here, starting with the African slaves and continuing through the Chinese who built our railways, the Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Hispanics...and the list goes on.

The Spanish American war might have been the first rumbling of our international meddling, if that's what you mean by losing our way. The thing is that the world is becoming smaller and more interdependent. It's not really an option for a major population like the US to be isolated from trade, economics and political policies that effect them.

Don't misunderstand me...I'm not taking an anti-American stance. I'm just saying that we have held high ideals but never really achieved them.

It depends what you mean by 'losing our way'. If you mean getting into debt, than yes, the two World Wars did mean that we had to be bailed out by the US, which we paid back by the 90s. If you mean culturally or morally, well that's more difficult to establish. Being involved in the war is an attempt to keep our cultural heritage (and for the Second World War it can be argued our moral one) and as we won both wars you can't really blame them.

We lost our way sometime after the hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer societies were never violent, they shared food, sometimes gave peace offerings. There was no ownership of land or resources. Then you got the Romans who fed christians to lions and made entertainment out of it.

You could also say we lost our way when we creates the federal reserve in 1913.

Another contributing factor is people having children. It's completely negligent and inconsiderate. Children die every five seconds. How could you have child when knowing it'll need resources that will have to be taken away from another persons child? Your child lives, another one dies. It's called structural violence and it's far worst than all the abortion, wars, and crime put together.

Do you remember what it was like when you were a young child and your parents told you all of those delightful fairy tales and assured you they were absolutely true while forgetting to explain that they were true only in a metaphorical way?

Then you grew up and found out that what you had been lead to believe was literally true by those who you had unquestionably thought were the ultimate authorities was not true at all....

You never looked at an "authority" the same again...and that was when Peter Pan left Neverland and had to grow up.

Individually, it started then.

namaste

We have never really known "our way" in fact the two world wars have advanced western civilisation ten fold! You could not imagine how hard it would be to live a peasants life anywhere on earth over the past 1000 years, now we have medical care, technology, education, human rights, instant communication, police, flight, just to name a few! We have never had it better