All my life Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest freest' country in the world. By most measurements it was long a contender for that honor and - among the larger countries if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.
You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.'