Sometimes I think of a country as an idea that was meant to make life easier for those who essentially entered into a non-binding agreement to work together in order to benefit the whole.
While this whole working together theory worked out quite well a major problem arose in the fact that these ideas formed all over the world and those who signed up didn't realize that future generations would take this agreement to seriously. Which is to say that the camaraderie that grew from one generation to the next within each 'agreement' grew so strong that much like the football fans making fun of one another and even fighting with one another so too did the various 'clicks.'
Innocent in its inception, though evil in its execution. What was just an agreement to help one another became an all out war when the biggest fans of each team decided their team was the best and they were going to prove it! At the same time none of the 'teams' are really any different, all designed originally as a means to make life easier through the sharing of ones labor.
Another problem that arose from this, what was once the sharing of ones labor has become the taking of ones labor. As generations passed after the original agreement and populations grew the whole began to take for granted the benefit gained from merely working together. In their greed they began not just to accept what people gave freely, but demand more.
Shared labor became forced labor. And now that we live in that world inherited from good intentioned, though ill-informed ancestors we have a few choices to make. What would appear to be the easiest road is to let yourself succumb to the mistakes of our past, but in the long run it only makes recovery so much harder. The best route, in my opinion, is not to believe it impossible to escape those mistakes, merely accept it for yourself that they were mistakes and need not be repeated by you as an individual.