Make or Break?

There’s a moment in Night at the Museum: Battle of Smithsonian where Bill Hader’s Gen. Custer and Amy Adams’ Emelia Earhart are riding a trike, while being chased by Ancient Egyptians bent on blood.  

Emilia turns to him and asks, “What’s your plan?” Custer looks at her quizzicly and responds with vigor: "We're Americans. We don't plan. We do."

That it’s said by the man who unwittingly marched his own soldiers into a massacre at Little Big Horn, is the joke in it. But I was also stuck by the truth of it. Because Americans have historically been doers. Go West, young man. And do what? You’ll figure it out when you get there. And that’s how they built America. Well, sort of.

American’s have also destroyed things just as easily, and with the same sort of enthusiastic blind-sided-ness. Which moment are we in now? Build it up? Or break it down?