I am in Europe - A few hundred km east of you ;)

It is like watching a painfully slow-motion film, or something being sucked into a black hole,

And it isn't even that slow. It has been a rapid degradation. Not only politically, but socially, individually, culturally....

But we are still affected with the World Wars that left a devastating memory to my grandparents, and I can feel it within my family, and the whole nation.

For sure, which is why Europe shouldn't leave protection in the hands of those willing to go to war for profit.