HELP: I feel a little bad about abandoning David with a nice piece by ee cummings and then not bothering to give any explanation. I don't have much appreciation for the style myself, believing, as T.S. Eliot did, that cummings' rarification of form ultimately stagnates further progress along those lines. Nevertheless, I think he makes his point beautifully.
Now, of course, I can't tell you what the poem means (where's the fun in that?); I can, however, give you a couple of points that might straighten things out for you.
1. Break it up into smaller pieces-- believe it or not, the punctuation marks are there for a reason.
2. The key phrase is "progress is a comfortable disease"
3. Helpful reference points would be Voltaire's Micromegas, and any of your pre-1950s critiques of the development of America. Also, think in the context of the most basic divisions of outlook* between us.
If you're still stumped after that, I can explain it to you in more detail, but the close-reading method is a little hairy in these cases, as you might imagine. Cheers!
* I would use the word "philosophy," since that would be the best choice, but I'm aware of your hostility to all things philosophy-related, and I'm sure you'd take umbrage at the suggestion that you were actually utilitizing philosophical concepts. So I went for the more convoluted wording instead.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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