I am an American living in Madrid. I have lived out of the US for more than 20 years. I look across now in sorrow and an emotion that I am not sure I can name. I see on the one hand reason for hope and on the other despair. For a nation, a people, to have been given so much and to have so recklessly, heedlessly cast it away. To see the me first and for me at all costs be the defining ethos when there is so much good and so much positive energy, to have this be what we are known for is something beyond sorrow, past shame, and on the road to no good end.