In my neck of the woods, and remember just how far off the reservation I can go, very little credence is given to the idea that American society can heal itself from the inside. The political / economic system is simply too corrupt to allow that to happen. The bad guys can't be voted from power because only bad guys are allowed on the ballot. Public information is distorted beyond any chance of finding the truth by many factors, a government hostile to a free press, a corporate power structure which controls most public media, and all media - including "news" - becoming just another commodity marketed for profit. The Internet is the Wild-Wild-West where more actuate reporting can be found and ideas freely rampage around, but avoiding the dross is near impossible. The judicial system is a wreck. And religion, which can sometimes be a focus of progressive social change, (i.e. the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, Catholicism's liberation theology, etc.) is now as compromised as the political system - lusting mostly for power and money.
None of this is absolute. Political figures who truly seek to serve the public interest sneak through. Not all corporate decisions are as abusive of workers / suppliers / customers / environment as they can possibly be. I suspect (and/or hope) there is a rather large number of pro-compassion / anti-abuse and anti-violence believers growing in many religions - even in some corners of Islam and the American Christian Right. (Okay, maybe not the American Christian Right. Those folks are, almost by definition, homophobic, racists, sexist, anti-education and tribal to the death. But there is an American Christian Left. Really. You could look it up.)
The institutions are corrupt, but the people? Not so much. Weird, I know, but human beings are messy, jumbled up bits of consciousness adrift in a massive cosmos. All together we act more along the lines of quantum mechanics than we do classical physics. Any individual has a range of probability when it comes to any particular choice. Those choices are not consistent and there is no way to predict exactly where any one of us will land on any particular issue.
(Human beings are literally quantum sized bits in the larger universe. Quantum effects are noted at sizes of 10(-14.7) meters. Human beings are sized around 10(-.2) meters. The Hubble deep field looks out to something like 10(+26.1) meters without reaching the boundary of the cosmos. So the scale difference between human beings and quantum effects is less than half the scale difference between human beings and the cosmos itself. I'm sure this doesn't mean anything, but I find the scale difference fascinating. We are to the cosmos what 1/2 of an atom is to us.)
So what does a quantum, social revolution look like? We are taught that, in the quantum world, things exist only as a probability until some interaction, some application of force, requires a resolution. People are a bit like that, not making a choice until some application of force from the outside, makes it unavoidable. So I can envision the pressure building in our society but so far it hasn't reached the trigger point for most people. When it does, what probability will become the new reality?
I think there is a good chance it can be peaceful. The anti-war movement of the 60s, civil rights, women's rights, even the early labor movement, started out as peaceful revolutions that changed society for the better. Sure there was some violence, mostly a result of the power structure seeking to defend itself against a loss of influence, but none of these degenerated into open, society wide, civil war. Replacing the current government / corporate structure will not be entirely without violence since they will not go away without a fight. But the violence need not be reciprocated.
How? By a massive movement that is more than shear numbers, a movement of probabilities. Not an "Occupy Wall Street" or even an "Occupy America" (though it might look like that on the evening news) but a fundamental shift in the bell curve as individual possibilities coalesce around a different peak. Instead of violence, control, and greed being at the top of the curve we see tolerance and liberty and compassion. Such a thing seems unlikely, human beings being human beings after all. But in the quantum world unlikely things happen. A whole lot of people are poor, and getting poorer. A whole lot of people long for the ability to actually care for themselves and the people they love without being burned by corporate greed and brutality. (A thousand people died making clothes - I still can't quite get my head around that. One thousand people deliberately put at risk and ultimately murdered for profit. One third the number lost on 9/11, one third. And this at the hand of corporate masters not Islamic terrorists.)
A whole lot of people will soon be suffering directly from climate change. A lot more people are going to go hungry. Many are going to hold children as they take their last breath due to disease. Disease that the well-to-do cure with a single pill or avoid with clean water. Not just in the "third world" but in our world, this world, the US of A world. Amongst our failing infrastructure are water and sewage treatment systems. Health care is out of reach for more and more, and one quarter of our children are born into poverty. This is an American reality.
More than enough pressure for a quantum change in human choices and possibilities.
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