America is armed to the teeth and fearful of its own shadow. Here and abroad. We fear so many boogeymen, real and imagined, that we can’t distinguish one from the other. Our homeland security grows and grows yet provides less and less convincing protection.

We own more and more guns while more and more victims of gun violence appear on more and more newscasts. We thank God when a mass shooting can be even remotely linked to an outside terrorist group, because that exercise in depravity brings us as close as we can come today to some semblance of comprehension rather than our world actually making no sense at all.

A man pulled over for a moving violation as minor as a busted taillight is shot dead without any provocation except for fear of the color of his skin. A woman in the passenger seat tearfully asks the law enforcement officer to please tell her that he hadn’t just murdered her boyfriend, that such senseless terrorism perpetrated by one dedicated to serve and protect might somehow still be mitigated and an innocent life returned to her.

Such incomprehensible scenes have become a commonplace occurrence. The violent polarization of our society seems altogether unstoppable. Police employ lethal force against the unarmed and go unpunished. The established order, no matter how corrupted, continues to be rationalized no matter how irrational the argument is constructed. Lady justice remains blind to those of one class while granting preferential leniency to those smelling of privilege.

Police officers risk their lives everyday to assist society’s most disadvantaged yet allow themselves to be stigmatized because of the actions of those whom, for whatever reason, cross the line and become what they are charged to combat. Self-policing internal investigations without broadly acceptable outcomes, with only lip service to remedying a perceived lack of justice, end up falsely indicting the vast number of dedicated and lawful law enforcement professionals.

Police officers purposefully running into harm’s way to protect those publicly gathered to protest growing police brutality are then gunned down by someone militarily trained in the proficient use of violence as a means of settling conflict.

The Second Amendment has become our most treasured freedom even if the price of that freedom routinely comes at the cost of the death of schoolchildren, families at the local movie house, coworkers at an office party or couples frequenting a dance club.

The tragic ironies of our present culture of denial, blame, prejudice, alienation and class tribalism remains endlessly frightening and circular in its causation. We are repeatedly assaulted by seemingly senseless criminal acts of violent intolerance or revenge while simultaneously victim to the calculated legal mayhem perpetrated upon our society by those driven by insatiable greed.

We look to political leadership for solutions and all we get is the same tired litany of reasons why nothing can be done, or that the solutions are there but can’t be properly implemented until we finally unite behind one party or the other’s obsessive desire for one-party rule.

The biggest obstacle to solving our nation’s present downward spiral, on all fronts, is our ongoing distraction in seeing each problem as somehow unrelated to an overarching point of origin.

Like most politicians, Clinton and Trump continue to confuse crisis management with true leadership, believing that fighting each battle separately will eventually win the war. Each tells the electorate that the greatest threat to America is letting the other candidate win the presidential election. Becoming CEO of America is their total endgame. Winning trumps purpose. A visionary mission statement can be formulated later. Branding is everything and the actual product can be repackaged as need be.

Sadly, the mainstream media is complicit in misdirecting or redirecting our national attention to sensationalism over substance.

Bernie Sanders has accurately accused the media of fixating on a cult of personalities and encouraging fear mongering instead of providing any penetrating inquiry as to what is causing our national discord, always focusing on Hillary, Donald and Bernie rather than illuminating the substantive issues that face America.

Now Bernie himself has suddenly fallen prey to that same mindset. Only yesterday he commanded an inspirational grass roots insurgency against a privileged oligarchy. Today he’s joined the establishment ranks of those expounding that Trump is the greatest threat to America.

The greatest threat, as Sanders well knows and spent the last 15 months proselytizing, is the profound economic disparity of our current form of capitalism. All else on the very long list of things wrong with this nation derives from denial of that fundamentally poisonous reality. Income inequality is the root cause for America’s lifeboat mentality pitting the middle class against the underclass instead of both uniting against the obscenely wealthy sailing onward without ever looking back.

Hillary will incrementally rearrange the deck chairs while The Donald blames the ship for allowing too many in steerage.

Fine tuning America’s discord or further stigmatizing those already alienated isn’t leadership. Unless the ship of state corrects course and undertakes some serious repairs, even those traveling first class may soon feel their feet getting wet.

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Gary Anderson lives in Bath