How do you know that your perspective now isn't even further away from reality--jaded, catastrophizing, polyannaish about alternatives--than your old one was?

Yes, you linked to evidence but it's not anywhere remotely close to establishing your thesis.

If you were asleep, too young, or not born during Vietnam, or the (second) Gulf War, or the War on Drugs interventions in Latin America, check it out! Your sudden realization that politics impinges upon the humanity with which the United States conducts itself is really really late in coming.

But there's a big difference between a blanket charge of immoral and a realization that generally moral ideals are compromised by self-interested or small-minded practicalities and that this always happens so our task is to make it happen as little as possible.

Similarly, you point out the 10k+ scientific articles retracted, but not that 5,000k+ scientific articles were published.

So my challenge to you is: in what way is your realization any better than simply being an agent of chaos, degrading civilization and reverting to a state of war and authoritarian rule?