Slow Decline At Hyper Speed

I went to bed one evening, slept the sleep of babes,

when I woke I no longer recognized all around me.

People were shouting, screaming, looking, but we no longer see.

and for the first time in memory, I wondered if we'd be okay.

We seemed to have undergone a change, but few noticed.

Common sense had slipped away, our heroes became less than smart.

Oh, we still had some smart people, but anger ripped us apart.

Our rhetoric was red hot, our cooperation was the coldest.

It looked to me like cooperation was going to be impossible to achieve,

what with the name-calling, it looked like it was us verses them,

and it was no-holds-barred, and used not to create, but to condemn.

And, no longer pinned to reason and science, were the things we believed.

How did everything I used to accept as the tried and the true,

the way things worked, the rules of the game, hell, the game itself,

change while I slept, disappear all at once, get put upon the shelf?

To become a bad imitation of a reality show, what are we going to do?