Americans have a love affair with the way things are, which is closely related to “the way we’ve always done things.”
(The only problem, of course, is that there is no single way we have always done anything.) The result is that we become extremely attached to our methods, whether they work or not. It doesn’t matter whether we are making any progress in the areas of race relations, violence, poverty, disease, or homelessness – we keep right on plodding along using the same methods and waiting for something to change. In Narcotics Anonymous, they call that insanity – and they are right!