In Persian Gulf countries, missiles, drones, and cluster bombs are falling from the sky in wave after wave. Innocent people huddle in basements and apartment buildings, praying they will not be blown up. Reciprocal murder spirals out of control, and now there is talk of sending in American ground forces to try to clamp down on the situation. But surely they too will be swallowed up by the war demon. A black hole opens up in the human world. All hell breaks loose.

Spin the globe a half turn.

In Gulf Coast states, teenagers do keg stands and twerk on the beach. Flash mobs swarm streets and businesses. Drunks in bathing suits lollygag in the warm surf, enjoying wave after wave. The police try to crack down, but lawmen can’t take control of people whose parents abandoned them to indiscipline long ago. Nihilism spreads out like a heroin rush. Utter callousness reigns.

There was a break this spring. It wasn’t just the usual bedlam of American spring break. An American president launched a willy-nilly nonsense war against Iran. American young people responded by drinking themselves into oblivion in the daylight. A handful of Americans may be called on to throw their bodies and souls into the useless, pointless suffering in the Middle East. Many other Americans couldn’t care less. The news is schizophrenic in the extreme. On one side of the world, horror. On the other side of the world, dissolution.

It used to be that war, at least, brought Americans together. Not even war works anymore. The old political ruses are used up. Bombing the Muslims just doesn’t get out the vote for the midterms like it once did. And so the immorality of the Washington class is laid bare. Without the rah-rah jingoism, there is just the disgusting spectacle of blood for power, and of the alcohol-induced stupor that undergirds it.

There is a connection, and yet a break, between what a few Americans do — cause mayhem or try to contain it — and what other Americans do, namely, debauch and befoul themselves, often while filming it for other nihilists around the world to enjoy on YouTube.

But the break this spring is much more than political. It is moral. It is spiritual.

The people getting incinerated in Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and elsewhere are our brothers and sisters. The children in Palestine who are still suffering, long after the genocide there has been forgotten by the rest of the world, are not just other people’s problem. They are our children, too, because they are children of God. Forget political belonging. A girls’ school gets hit by a Tomahawk missile — that is not just an Iran-America problem. That is a human problem. Those little kids are precious in God’s sight.

Just a few years ago Americans cried at a movie proclaiming that God’s children are not for sale. This year, Americans seem able to shrug off the fact that God’s children are being targeted for vaporization by the United States military.

Many Americans are cheering for it, in fact. The Secretary of War prays to God that those who deserve no mercy be killed. The way to tell who deserves mercy and who doesn’t is apparently to kill everyone and let God sort them out.

America may once have been a Christian nation. I doubt it, but maybe. People sure used to talk about the Bible a lot, while killing Indians. At any rate, for my lifetime at least, America has pretended to be a Christian nation. Not even the charade continues now. America has become a full-on barbarian, a devil with a death wish for everything gentle and good.

All the better if the mayhem can conceal politicians’ connections to a pedophile who invited Harvard professors and Wall Street bankers, among many other “elites,” to his child rape island. Carpet bomb some foreigners and hope the lying media pays attention to that instead.

There was a break this spring. America turned a corner. Now it walks a pitch-black road.

The spring breakers fill their red plastic cups and drink on.