Invariably, articles and posts decrying the disappointing real state of affairs in the United States present their observations in terms of temporal equivocation. They write that this mythical collective of unified Americans known editorially as "we" need to change this, that, and everything else about the current state of affairs in America "before it's too late."

Regardless of whether the observation takes in America's rampant social and economic inequality, the stark injustice of its legal system, its decaying and neglected infrastructure, its abandonment of public education, its grossly overpaid and opportunistic government officials, its greedy and ruthless corporations and banks, its institutionalized bigotry, its over-extensive and coercive global military, its intrusive and subversive "intelligence" operations, its support of undemocratic client and puppet regimes and suppression of those "rogue" regimes that to do not submit to America's global capital empire, and other facets, the time-frame is always placed safely in the future. None of these suboptimal states have really happened, yet. They will always and ever be looming in the unreality of potentiality.

It is a rhetorical means of ontological etiolation. The being, the actuality, of the thing is drained away to leave only the words.  The reality of the matter is flattened and rendered impotent, moot.

This always results in the naïve and impotent admonition that if "we" do not "wake up" and act together, and soon, to change things from the ground up, these awful states of affairs could, some day, come true.

But, this and that dismal state of affairs already exists, and many have existed for years, decades, even centuries, and this is blatantly obvious to anyone whose mind is both ideologically unclouded and well-educated enough to recognize it.

In the minds of such authors and so, too, in their audiences, these dismal and even shameful states of affairs are still looming, impending, still not yet actually happening. We are still those pure and unsullied Americans that populate our mythology, our white-washed history, and who comprise our national identity as we cognitively observe these things that we have done and are doing from a secure psychic and moral distance, as though "we" hadn't yet committed them. It is an amazing cognitive maneuver of self- and social and cultural absolution and expiation.  A moral defense mechanism and carte blanche means of self-justification.

It is also the basis of utter irresponsibility and hypocrisy, and it is built-in to the American mind.