I have a few problems with this piece.

Not with your reasoning, that would be much easier to deal with, but rather, something more... sinister? Basic?

I'm not certain of what words to use.

So I'll be blunt. You give the American center too much credit. Both of us.

Yeah, I said it. There IS no American center. There's the far right, slightly less far right, and the far left, and a huge fucking chasm in the middle that we're shouting across to no effect.

Switzerland has lots of guns, and they're not blasting each other.

They also have social safety nets, and calling a care worker for a troubled child in most of Europe, as near as this American can determine, doesn't end the family.

America's "help and health" institutions are punitive, like nearly every other bit of social law we've managed to eak out over the last five decades.

The kids know this. Their parents know this. You don't seek help in America, because what comes is anything but.

Kid might have a mental illness? Clearly deficient parenting, or the kid has bad wiring, or (especially if your family is among the poor, which is a fuckload of us) you're criminally neglectful.

Kid gets taken away, put in a hole to be forgotten until they have reached 18, then kicked out of the hole and forgotten again.

And again and again, any and all attempts to even DISCUSS this fall on deaf ears of legislators.

I don't think this can be fixed. I think the United States *HAS* to fall before we can fix anything.

And that will be bloody. I wish it could be otherwise. I want it to be otherwise. But daily, I lose a little more hope.