In ww2, we dropped two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilian populations in order to compel the nation's leadership to surrender. We did not use our nuclear assets to terminate the enemy civilian and military leaders. Today, we routinely employ our military assets to terminate enemy combatant leaders: drones, snipers and high tech ordnance allow precision removal of enemy command  and high-value assets.
   The modern innovation of asymmetrical warefare, and the massive growth of mass media of the past century have resulted in extensive erosion of the trappings of honor and martial mores that informed western martial culture and warfare for centuries. The soldier is no longer popularly imagined as an honorable, heroic officer defending society, but as just another monkey in the chain (arranged in a long line by height, each beaten by his larger neighbor while busily beating away on the smaller monkey on his other side...)
   There is something wrong with the way our nation uses martial interventions. Parcel to this issue is our use of mercenaries in our modern military actions. Private military corporations are an end run around our democracy, and allow an egregious misuse of American combat veterans, who are these businesses primary employees. The issues attending warfare are altogether too vital, and important, to be trusted to private companies. And the men and women defending our nation while in private employ deserve the same protections and compensations as our military personnel serving in our formal military.
  We live in a nation tormented by a storm of miseries. Beset by a bewildering stew pot of problems, systemic abuses, human weaknesses and political contention, it is difficult to prioritize. Modern America is in a disastrous state: we are living in a national Emergency Room in a disaster and while we mostly all agree there  is a problem of some sort, we cannot even come to agreement about a triage policy. Certainly no agreement about what the problem actually is, or a triage policy,  is in any danger of suddenly blooming into consensus.
  My first impulse is to be more loving, to look for a way to promote empathy in myself. If I could change how some of these problems express inside myself, that could be a place to start. But I think maybe that is asking too much (or too little). Perhaps we might begin using our media, already so gifted at tweaking and guiding public behavior, to promote more civic - positive political policy.
  Our political system is geared to respond to financial pressure. In many ways, our democracy functions in a figurative, rather than literal, sense. We have a functional government, it's just not really properly called a democracy - and just what it should be called would depend upon the level of government you were speaking of and belongs elsewhere. But the political realities in which we live could be used to promote a more utopian social ideal than what we currently endure. The problem is, lack of misery or profit. In order to combat the powerful private interests, one would need to marshall financial resources that could compete with those of the "enemy". As the forces arrayed seem to be those of the .5% of the  nation that control 99.5% of the national wealth standing one one side, and the 99.5% of the population who control .5% of the national wealth on the other, the result of the  conflict does not seem to be in doubt.
  I believe most of the foregoing paragraph; and while i grant the pessimistic end of the final sentence, it is not the final word on the subject. but its a complex field of thorny issues. i will lay out some of my thoughts to try and martial up some clarity:
    A small minority of our nation wields enormous power.

   Our government operates largely by forces opaque to common observation and exempt from democratic checks.

   The people of our nation are not in a position to challenge the ruling minority through direct financial means.

   The media wields enormous influence in the minds of the nation.

   Much of the work of the ruling class is carried out by systemic forces rather than through their direct oversight and intervention (the system has many self-perpetuating & self-regulating components that further the aims of the ruling class due to a convenient confluence of self-interest, abject dependence and need rather than direct, insidious manipulations by nefarious cabals)

   With these premises, I start to see a means of attacking the problem. Trying to compete on financial grounds seems doomed - the enemy are too well armed, and our side are poor by definition. However, the ability to utilize media to effect public opinion is the elephant in the room. Media in the modern age is in an unprecedented position in its' history - never before has the bar been so low so far as having access to news and information. And never before has information been more readily available, and in whatever medium a person may require. In an age of unprecedented literacy, knowledge and information are readily available in many formats, though most modern news media comes in spoken format by default.
   It seems the easiest way to begin assaulting the enemies' power base is through media. n a sense, our social fighting about choosing presidential canddates is part of thr same effort. We need to build social consensus about what the problems are, and agreement about prioritizing the solution actions. Presidential elections are great excersizes for mobiliing communities to implement social changes.
   The take away from elections is that the organizing methods, team building expertise, and deft use of social media technology are important parts of the toolchest for social change. Perhaps these organizational skills could be organized, collated and presented in a format(set of formats) and made available to activist groups. Having a common language and a technology for collaborative communication could help promote cooperation between groups with similar agendas or philosophies.  There are lots of reasons to promote the idea, I will move on.
   The nation is seething with emotion, strongly in the grip of the debates that attend the ramp-up for our coming national elections.  Much like the brief flare of charitable donations that accompany the yearly end of the western calendar, our national social conscience ignites for a brief, indignant inferno every four years. Following presidential selection, the fires are banked, receding into coals nursed by the dedicated, and those too effected, tormented or afflicted to be allowed the option of turning their attenttion away.
   It seems a tragic waste, to allow all that organization to be squandered, thrown away after the election if over. Perhaps civic groups should exist, and be utilized by candidates that can secure them. My neighborhood, in North Minneapolis, could certainly use a civic, socially minded organization that bwas well connected through social media. And while my urban setting is more charged with racial and financial issues tha the "average" american neighborhood, the utility of such a group would be very broad indeed..
   I have perhaps, again, stumbled across another argument in favor of what are, in effect, Anarchist "Affinity Groups" becoming mainstream, common facets of modern society. Of course you could never market it as an "Anarchist" anything, but the idea is the same - self organizing civic groups arranged by common interests strong eneough to motivate actual activity and action. The civic answer to religious community service organizations, in a sense. Perhaps the massive public interest in social media could be harnessed toward social progress in addittion to the practical applicationa of socializing and entertainment.

At-will compassion, situational cooperative flexibility, and desire to obtain personal change

  There is a group of humans who's language includes uvula - waving as part of their language sound pallet. Not only could a person like myself not make this(these) sound(s), it is unlikely I would even perceive it(them). (Not from inherent inability, but because I am an adult and the developmental opportunity has passed, similarly my ears lost the high-range sensitivity from disuse) There are differences in these persons experienced reality and my own. This population, in fact, admirably illustrates difference. They possess an ability that I do not. We are, in a practical sense, unequal. From their perspective, I could be said to be disabled, lacking both an ability to produce part of the sound spectrum, and also to perceive that spectrum. We are certainly equally human; yet we are not equal in capacity or performance.
  What does it mean to all be created equal? If equality is esoteric and figurative, rather than practical and literal, how does it differ from a "Noble Lie"? Does our Equality rest on the claim of Created equality - we are equal in some otherworldly, god-derived sense, because God "created" us so? Is it a legal fiat accomplished by declaration? Or are we equal in the Animal Farm sense - as in, we are all equal, but Some are more equal than Others?
   The Buddha seems partial to compassion. While that is another kettle of fish, it is an answer of sorts to this topic for myself. I am sure I could dredge up a similar Christian rationalization too. We have lots of choice about the world we perceive. Part of our shared humanity is the investment=suffering equation.
   We live in a world in which we are connected in diverse novel ways. Our social dynamics really need a greater level of complexity, in order to really make the most of human potential. Dolphins clique up in a complex manner, with second, third, and fourth order sociopolitical alliances that vary and alter depending on circumstances. Other groups and individual dolphins can be enemies or allies depending on where and when they encounter each other - the behavior suits the dolphins best interest, rather than some code. As it sits right now for humans, the kind of fluid consensus building behavior I am talking about is really only practiced by the legal weasels and mercenary politicians behind closed doors, rather than in the open by respected leaders.
   There is a pressing need to build excuses, or motivation, preference, desire, within ourselves to promote compassion and practical consensus-building. I am promoting compassion here expressly because of the way compassion nurtures consensus. When in my interest, it should be possible to respect people who hold hostile or opposing views to my own. It should even be possible to find common cause with such persons, on such occasions when doing so would profit my goals or needs (this threatens to branch off into "can the end justify the means" discussion).
   The media has an agenda of its own (whatever you may think that is). There are lots of causes trying to address specific issues, but few voices raised to promote better, more complex and practical consensus building in general. That is where our countries attention should be spent - on building a social desire for modern, practical engines of democracy. These practical democracy engines could benefit humanity on a wide spectrum of levels. But to harness this well of potential, the people of our nation need to be hungry for that kind of change.
   We live in a troubled, fractious nation. Our country has been taught to know a constant hunger for safety from the threat of terror, and a shifting faulty economy. As the nation starves for solution to economic and civil unrest, so too our nation must nurture a hunger for obtaining broader solutions: we need to WANT to obtain consensus. It is well and good that we have political parties that represent differing philosophies, but the system is incomplete - it needs a means of bringing the machine all together following an election. And more generally, the nation needs to be hungry, to desire, the sort of connectedness and civil communion in which practical consensus can regularly be realized.
  We as humans are created equal in many senses, many perspectives.  But you would need a pretty loose definition of the word "equal", if you were to claim that "U.S. citizens all enjoy equal opportunities, treatment and privileges". So, within me, I see two related areas of desirable growth. Both of these are topics which recommend themselves to a broader audience. The first, is the need to nurture a desire for access to an at-will compassionate perspective: to want the capacity to empathize when chosen or desired. The second, is the ability to develop a sensitivity to how much objective utility a particular instance of situational cooperation offers- the ability to see when the practical deployment of "on-demand" compassion offers utility or benefit. More people might choose cooperation and achieve consensus, if the path were more clearly marked and the map widely published.
   After reading this again to edit for clarity, it occurred to me to offer a caveat. I am in no way advocating a lessening of compassion, or that I or anyone else create a means of limiting or lessening/limiting the amount of compassion I/they employ. I advocate broadening the conditions and situations in which compassion and cooperation occur, to the greatest degree practical and reasonable. We need to be responsible in safeguarding ourselves, and whatever causes or values we support - balancing caution against whatever gains we may secure.
   There are perspectives that allow us to see humanity as all equal, in some sense. Humans can share similarities, but are not the same. We are challenged by a wild array of difficulties: how we pursue our lives makes a statement about our convictions. How we frame our struggle, identify and name our goals, foes and foils, gives to our selves their aspect and identity. A clever, gifted individual might - with an unusual degree of luck, happenstance, and indulgence - be to some degree self-realized. But we are none of us self-made. With motivation, practice, and attention, it is possible to achieve occasional, even regular, periods of self-awareness.  Promoting healthy, positive prosocial desires, like at-will compassion and situational social cooperation and consensus-building, seems like a safe, practical intervention.