No, James, we did not have the capacity to destroy ourselves. As I'm now in my 8th decade of life, I can assure you that I remember those times, and the world was a very different place to what it was now.

For a start, the first time I hard the phrase, 'follow one's dreams,' was in my mid-50s after I immigrated to America. I had never ever heard it before. In the rest of the world, it was most certainly not about following one's dreams. It was about putting the community and family needs ahead of one's own.

In times of trouble, we had a 'stiff upper lip,' and we got on with it. We did not suffer from victimhood and decry our trails and pains publicly.

Nor was America the leader of the world. That was the British Empire, into which I was born. During school days, it was said that the sun never set on the British Empire, and all maps were printed in diffferent colors, with the countries that belonged to the British Empire in Red.

Both my parents were veterans during WWII. My later father was also a Holocaust survivor. He was in Switzerland when the Gestapo came for him in 1936 and shut down the newspaper he was working for.

I note that you are a philosophy student. Well, i grew up with hard science. And philosophy is wishful thinking while science is not. We look at where the evidence leads.

I am not giving up my life. I have moved to Ireland, one of the few countries that stands a good chance of suriving climate change. It can provide its own food, will probably not run out of water, and it has sufficient green energy (wind turbines) to provide for itself.

I suggest you change your major to hard science.