node created 2017/03/26
Notice the American focus on individuals and figureheads, single people who you can attack and onto which you can offload your problems. Couple this with partisan feuding which is being fuelled and is causing the left-right divide to grow even more rapidly, you end up with precisely this: Americans bickering and engaged in vitriolic argumentation over whose side is better, without the key issues ever being addressed. Without stopping and thinking about holding your country to account/doing anything about it.

That is the manipulation. And the deception is as you say, those old/young, left/right, tacitly sold on the lie that this perpetual state of war is somehow necessary and driven by anything but your country's massive military industrial complex. A complex which most Americans I've seen don't even deny, but at best shrug/laugh off as "haha, maybe we're the bad guys" but internally justifying and convincing themselves otherwise.

And because of the "us vs them" dichotomy that you've been fed, that internal justification is automatic when thinking about any situation involving America and the Middle East: "are we the bad guys? Well it's us vs them, and they're the bad guys so no, we're the good guys".

And it's that that I believe has lead to your current physical inability to empathise with the killing of innocent human beings in the Middle East. Not tiredness or burnout; just "us vs them".