I heard the author on NPR this week and am glad to have found the article. He mentioned on the air that the section below was his biggest surprise in the interview. I suspect we're beginning an unraveling as a nation so I'm not as surprised as the author but am alarmed that Mattis has similar concerns.
A good read and reassuring that Mattis and Tillerson are on the deck with the Tweeter In Chief.
When I asked what worried him most in his new position, I expected him to say isis or Russia or the defense budget. Instead, he said, “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.
“I come out of the tight-knit Marine Corps, but I’ve lived on college campuses for three and a half years,” he went on. “Go back to Ben Franklin—his descriptions about how the Iroquois Nations lived and worked together. Compare that to America today. I think that, when you look at veterans coming out of the wars, they’re more and more just slapped in the face by that isolation, and they’re used to something better. They think it’s P.T.S.D.—which it can be—but it’s really about alienation. If you lose any sense of being part of something bigger, then why should you care about your fellow-man?”