I was reading the news from Buffalo — the news about how a racist young man, fueled by wild conspiracy theories that were amplified by bad actors on the internet and cable TV, traveled 200 miles to murder a bunch of innocent people with his modified assault rifle — and I thought: this just isn’t sustainable.

Sustainability is a word we usually associate with the environment. It’s often stripped of meaning by marketing and political rhetoric — for example, companies love to tell us they’re striving for sustainability in the way that they pump oil out of the earth in order to burn it or the way that they manufacture millions of disposable plastic bottles every day that they know will end up in landfills.

But the word does have a meaning. Here are a couple of definitions that I like:

• Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (McGill University)
• To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations. (EPA)

If we take the word out of an environmental context, perhaps we can define it this way — a system is sustainable if it’s in balance, if it’s not damaging the future on behalf of the present, if things can continue on indefinitely as they are now.

Does anybody think that we can describe the United States as sustainable?

It certainly doesn’t feel as though things can go on the way that they have been, not without something snapping.

What’s not sustainable about American society? Here’s a brief and not-at-all comprehensive list. I’m sure you can add a number of things to it (feel free in the comments).

The United States has more guns than any other country, by far. We have more than one gun per person. That’s double the next most gun-owning nation, which is Yemen.

More than 45,000 people died in the country because of guns in 2020. Our gun-homicide rate, gun-suicide rate, and overall homicide rate are far higher than most other developed countries. Many of the guns being sold are simply murder weapons. They’re not terribly useful for hunting or even defending the home. They are based on weapons of war. We are approaching 200 mass shootings in 2022. It’s May.

One of our two political parties, the one that is likely to take power in both houses of our legislature next year, thinks that this is not a problem. The real problem, they think, is that people might have their precious gun rights threatened someday; after all, citizens may have to fight off jackbooted government thugs. Republicans routinely indulge in dangerous political rhetoric around guns, posing for their Christmas cards with their assault rifles and making jokes about murdering ideological enemies. They haven’t changed course, despite the fact that their rhetoric has led to a number of murders.

Race and immigration

There’s a growing racial divide in the country. Sparked by horrific videos of police murders, the Black Lives Matter movement inspired massive protests in 2020. The protests were an incredible outpouring of emotion, but they didn’t result in many concrete policy changes.

These protests took place at a time when things seemed to be moving away from racial justice in many parts of the country. A racial backlash among some white Americans, first detectable as a reaction to the election of Barack Obama, has grown — and become more and more explicit in recent years. This backlash has been mainstreamed by cynical pundits and politicians, most importantly the most recent president, who routinely uttered things that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier.

Many on the right — like the apparent Buffalo shooter — have become convinced that there is a grand conspiracy to “replace” whites with immigrants and other racial groups. Cable news’ most popular host and many prominent politicians now espouse this theory, which has been directly cited by several mass murderers.

Cost of living

For a while, the things we didn’t really need to lead a fulfilling life (the latest fashions, gasoline for our fuel-hungry SUVs, junk food, electronic gadgets, cheap plastic crap) were getting cheaper while the things that actually improve life (housing, healthcare, education) were getting drastically more expensive. We could console ourselves about the $7,000 (or maybe $10,000! Or $15,000! No way to tell ahead of time!) bill for the birth of a child by thinking about all of the money we’d save on cheap toys for the kid as they grew up.

It’s slowly become very difficult for average Americans to afford essential things — a house, tuition at a state college, etc. — that previous generations might have taken for granted. Now, of course, even the stuff that used to be cheap is expensive. What are Americans going to do now that they can’t even overindulge in consumer goods in the way to which they have become accustomed?

The environment

Of course, the consumerist bonanza of the last 50 years isn’t environmentally sustainable either. Much of that cheap junk that we purchased to nudge our brain chemistry in the right direction for an hour or two required resources that will never be recycled or reused. All of the meat we ate depleted the land that sustains our lives. All of those big SUVs and pickup trucks we bought to make ourselves feel important were heating the planet.

Now, we’re starting to reap what we’ve sown. The climate on which we all depend for life is in crisis, and we are doing … absolutely nothing. Our political system seems completely unable to cope with the environmental crisis that’s coming. This, right now, is the best moment to push things in a better direction, but it looks like we won’t do it because of the undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate, arcane filibuster rules, and the personal corruption of one West Virginia Senator.

Political dysfunction

Most of the above examples of our unsustainability interact with our political system’s inability to do, well, anything, really. The checks and balances that the framers installed in the Constitution as brakes on impetuous mob action have become roadblocks in the hands of cynical, maximalist politicians. Our politics is more polarized than it has been in a long time.

Both parties see the other as a grave threat to democracy and the American way of life. One of them, the GOP, actually does pose a danger to democracy. Many of its leading politicians have embraced dangerous lies as part of a strategy that relies on constantly stoking the fury of the party’s base. Whether that fury is justified is beside the point. This misinformation is amplified by technology companies that have hacked our attention in unhealthy ways. The Democrats’ attempts to govern seem to be feeble at best. As serious problems mount around them, our political leaders seem unable to grapple in any serious way with any of them.

So — it feels as though something has to give.

Our social fabric is under immense strain, from these and many other problems. It can’t go on, can it? We’ve been kicking the can down the road for decades now, on guns, climate, immigration, healthcare, you name it. We were able to ignore the problems for a while as they mounted, but it feels as though, now, they’re increasingly impossible to avoid.

I’m not necessarily predicting civil war or a complete breakdown of American society.

But our assumption of the last several decades — that we can keep ignoring these problems while enjoying uninterrupted prosperity, social cohesion, and political stability — seems farfetched.

Maybe we continue on our current path, and we experience a slow slide into greater and greater dysfunction and inequality. Wealthy Americans will pull up the drawbridges around their privilege, ensuring that they can continue to live pleasant lives. They’ll be able to send their kids to college and pay whatever it takes to get their appendices out when the time comes. They’ll be able to put in floodwalls to protect their homes from rising seas and hire private security to keep the crime out of their fancy neighborhoods. If the roads don’t get repaired, they’ll buy a Range Rover and bounce over the potholes. They’ll rig our politics to make sure they get to keep things the way they want them.

Perhaps there will be a violent outburst of some kind, something that forces leaders to finally get their heads out of the sand and reckon with what we’ve become. January 6th felt that way for a minute, but clouds of cynical, self-serving disinformation enveloped it after a couple of days. If January 6th showed anything, it’s that it will take something scarier than a mob storming our seat of government to shake the country out of its stupor. We’ve had a few of these in our history — the Civil War, for example, or the political turmoil around civil rights and Vietnam. If we go this way, it won’t be pretty, and it will be impossible to foresee the consequences.

Or maybe, just maybe, our politicians will devote themselves to sustainability. Perhaps they’ll begin to chip away at our problems in order to make our society more harmonious, more stable, and more future-focused.

I’m not betting on it.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to receive an email whenever I publish an article, click here. I’d be forever grateful if you consider supporting my writing. There are two ways to do so: by buying me a cup of coffee here or by joining Medium with this link (I’ll receive a portion of your membership fee at no additional cost to you).