re: The world in general is becoming an ever more angry, blood thirsty, and violent place.

I do think a big change, as mentioned, is that every single thing nowadays is viewed through a political (in the generic sense) prism. You see it everywhere. People reviewing and evaluating everything through the lens of sociological grievances, full of anger and angst. A sport of emotional one-upmanship. Every background visual, every line of dialogue, in books, movies, advertising, etc., have become manipulatively conscious statements, and every consumer of such material microscopically dissects it for perceived subtexts. It's a caustic and rather Marxist-styled worldview, which has particularly settled in, during this internet age, sort of like a mental virus. It's pretty grotesque, and ultimately makes for a rather hellish cultural soup to exist in. Quite the opposite to what used to constitute the American outlook of generations past.