How will the World remember US?

I'd like to be forgiven for commenting at such great length on the state of my state, but Wisconsin's fate is a subject dear to my heart. Almost up to the very end of the Twentieth Century, Milwaukee's murder rate was measurably lower than many (most?) American cities of comparable size. But beginning about 1975, the factories started to close, one by one. The CIA-sponsored crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-to-late 1980s contributed to astonishing, by our reckoning, bloodshed and mayhem, particularly in the urban ghettos of our tougher towns. Rampant discrimination and repression directed at the Black and Latino minorities, always a serious problem, became severe. We were saddled with Tommy Thompson's Republican administration - remember, this was years before Scott Walker - whose answer to the manifest social disintegration was putting many more thousands of the disadvantaged in prison. The gunfire in our slum streets, always there, always a vile and despicable scourge, got louder by the year. But it is still, despite all its horridness, a symptom of an even greater malady. Example: The Pentagon, and its trillion-dollar budgets, year after frustrating year. Decades of interminable wars against almost totally illusory "enemies." Schools so scandalously underfunded and inadequate to the purpose, they don't confer a decent education to the children. You Republicans, stop blaming the teachers! Why, we were one of the ten top manufacturing states in 1970 - that is so long ago now, and what a sad, sad memory of loss, of incalculable loss. I regret to inform you, as if you did not know already... What we're talking about is... End of Empire, with all the fear, hatred, scapegoating and ruthlessness that comes with. So sorry, but the truth is just that, and of course, mine, as I see it. On that note, don't lose hope, keep hope alive, even though I have so precious little of it left for my US of America. But you know something? It wasn't always nearly THIS bad, before Scott Walker and the billionaires who were instrumental in installing him in the Governor's mansion set out to remake our comparatively Progressive state in the image of truly barbaric US states... Texas, Alabama, Arizona, for example. As most of you know, we had strong labor unions, relatively good public schools, tens and tens of thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs, some of the best health care available in America. An excellent, by national standards, public university system. Ah, but all of that has come under increasing attack, especially since the 2008 recession set in, permanently, it appears. Oh sure, this was the wild frontier right up until 1860 or thereabouts, and the deer-hunting culture has been exceedingly strong ever since the White Man's burden was imposed by theft and extermination upon the Native Americans. But now? Hey, you can't have a cell phone, or wear a hat, or carry a camera in the Senate Gallery. But worry not - the signs are prominently posted, informing you just where you can carry your concealed pistol in that imposing Capitol. We're devolving, MAGNUMficently!