Thing is, the changes that became formal in 1965 in this country have taken 50 years to work out in practice into all the little corners of this big land, and it is a big land.

As our population grows, more and more people will be living in cities, large or small, and a small percentage in truly rural areas. And those living in small cities will be tied even more, culturally, to the large cities, which are the hubs of cultural integration.

So at least in the mid term I am not so negative on how we can handle the atavists. There will always be conflicts and this or that flare up of hate, but our current cultural trajectory is away from the white Protestant fundamentalist hegemony of the last 350 years or so. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push back against atavist flare-ups, just that we should be confident that when we do push back we can make progress.

Long term - well, there are so many problems with overpopulation and ecosystem sustainability that in the end we will all go the way of our ancestral species - extinct.

But for now you can eat, drink, and be merry.