Nov. 5, 2015

“Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds.” That headline in Tuesday’s New York Times caused a shock wave.

It seems two researchers, one a Nobel Prize recipient, discovered that white Americans in their 40s and 50s are “committing suicide at an unprecedented rate,” as well as dying from rampant drug abuse. As the Times reported:

    Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

Hit the pause button.

Just two days earlier, Americans were likewise stunned by a “60 Minutes” segment titled “Heroin in the Heartland” chronicling an epidemic of heroin and opioid addiction among white, middle-class, suburban high school students in Columbus, Ohio – and, experts say, throughout the nation.

As CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker explained, heroin dealers connected to Mexican cartels “are making huge profits by expanding to new, lucrative markets: suburbs all across the country,” where they are targeting “a new set of consumers: high school students, college athletes, teachers and professionals.”

Regarding those way-over-prescribed opioids (synthetic morphine-like pain pills), a Columbus nurse told “60 Minutes”: “Last year, three quarters of a billion pain pills were prescribed by doctors in Ohio – nearly 65 pills for every man, woman and child in the state.”

Both news reports – one about middle-aged white people and the other about suburban youngsters in their teens and 20s, all either dead or in the process of killing themselves through substance abuse – have fueled the national discussion all week.

To which I can only say: Don’t be surprised. Welcome to Obama’s America.

SPECIAL OFFER: Get your copy of David Kupelian’s “The Snapping of the American Mind: Healing a Nation Broken by a Lawless Government and Godless Culture” – autographed and personalized – at a special discount at the WND Superstore!

Let’s take a quick break from our obsession with the day’s political news, with all its scandals, outrages and threats, and take a hard look at what’s really going on all around us every day in the wake of the Obama-left’s much-heralded “fundamental transformation of America.”

Fasten your seatbelt:

    “Drug overdose deaths are the leading cause of injury death in the United States, ahead of deaths from motor vehicle accidents and firearms,” the DEA just announced. Equally disturbing, Stars and Stripes reports that in recent years more active-duty U.S. soldiers have been dying by suicide than in combat.

    Shocking research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that one in five of all high-school-aged children in the United States has been diagnosed with ADHD, while a large study of New York City residents shows, sadly, that one in five preteens – children aged six to 12 – have been medically diagnosed with either ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or depression.

    Equally alarming, one in 10 girls reportedly engages in “self-harm” in the form of “cutting” their bodies with a knife or razor, while New York’s state Department of Health reports that “self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, burning, and pinching, are the second leading cause of hospitalizations due to injury for children ages 15 to 19 years.”

    Fully one-third of the nation’s employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, and more than half of all “millennials” (18- to-33-year-olds) experience a level of stress that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder.

    Incredibly, eleven percent of all Americans aged twelve and older are currently taking antidepressants – those powerfully mood-altering psychiatric drugs with the FDA’s “suicidality” warning label and alarming correlation with mass shootings.

    Add to that the tens of millions of users of all other types of psychiatric drugs, including the 6.4 million American children between 4 and 17 diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin or similar psycho-stimulants. Throw in the 28 percent of American adults with a drinking problem – that’s more than 60 million – plus the 24 million using illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin and hallucinogens, and pretty soon a picture emerges of a nation of drug-takers, with well over a hundred million of us dependent on one toxic substance or another, legal or illegal, just to get through life.

    And Americans aren’t addicted just to drugs and alcohol, but, it seems, to everything: Enormous numbers of men, women, and children are addicted to online pornography (85 percent of young men and nearly 50 percent of young women reportedly watch porn at least once a month). That may be why an astonishing 110 million Americans currently have a sexually transmitted disease. Food addiction is also rampant, with one in three American adults clinically obese, and more than one in six of the nation’s youth.

What on earth is going on?

Snap!

In my new book, “The Snapping of the American Mind: Healing a Nation Broken by a Lawless Government and Godless Culture,” I argue that the radical upsurge in all these current-day problems is overwhelmingly caused or exacerbated by the influence of the political and cultural left, which today dominates virtually all of America’s major institutions, including education, culture, news and entertainment media, and government. I connect the dots between, on one hand, the progressive left’s utopian political and moral transformation of America over the last two generations (now in overdrive in the age of Obama) and, on the other hand, the tidal wave of human misery, depression, dysfunction, brokenness, family breakdown, mental illness and addiction we increasingly see all around us.

Bottom line: The left is not only unhinged from reality, it is driving millions of unsuspecting Americans over the edge as well.

Consider: Long before Obama came along, the left gave us two big things:

1. It launched the “sexual liberation movement” (including the LGBT juggernaut, which today demands that teenage schoolgirls be forced to shower with boys who think they’re girls). This ever-metastasizing revolution has given us wild sexual anarchy, ubiquitous porn addiction, family breakdown, rampant divorce (and subsequent government dependency), widespread fatherlessness and all the suffering, criminality and pathology that causes, drug abuse, abortion (3,000 per day) and misery all around.

2. The secular left also has indoctrinated our children, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to believe there is no God, no objective standard of right and wrong, no moral standard and no truth. That in itself, whether we realize it or not, rips a person’s soul in two and creates a huge pain and emptiness that will be filled – often with drugs and sex.

Now put yourself in the place of these heroin-addicted high school kids on “60 Minutes.” Not only have many had their faith, values and morality ripped off, but for close to half of their lives Barack Obama has been president. Consider further that a president is somewhat like a “father of the country” during his time in office, automatically exerting a sort of “radiant effect” on the population, just as a dad does on his family. Unfortunately, instead of being blessed with an honorable, moral, inspiring, Reagan-like figure as president, today’s youth have been saddled with a bitter and dishonest “father” who lies constantly, deceives the “family” every day, encourages his “kids” to engage in the most ignoble and perverse behaviors, rebukes them for speaking honestly to him, betrays his friends and supports his enemies, all while pretending to care for his “family.”

What do we expect to happen to the next generation when we take God, morality and American exceptionalism away from them? They’re going to be angry, conflicted, lost, and full of a pain and emptiness they can’t even identify.

Want more concrete evidence that the left is driving Americans crazy?

    A major study involving more than 800,000 women shows that pregnant women who had an abortion “face double the risk of mental health problems.”

    Multiple studies show Democrats are twice as likely to be mentally ill as Republicans.

    “Psychology Today” reports that “Today’s college students are suffering from an epidemic of mental illnesses.” While citing dire trends (one in three students suffers “prolonged periods of depression,” one in four reports feeling suicidal), the article never quite manages to identify the underlying reasons for today’s “greater levels of stress and psychopathology [in college] than any time in the nation’s history.”

    Yet, according to recent peer-reviewed research, campus life’s widespread “hooking up” culture causes significantly “higher levels of depression” (not to mention sexual violence and STDs) in college women. Again, we can thank the left for unleashing “sexual liberation” on America, which pervades university life and is encouraged by perverse programs like the popular annual “Sex Week” on-campus event.

    Likewise, consider political correctness, which even Newsweek acknowledged is a “Marxist,” “totalitarian” system of thought control and which caused historian William Lind to characterize today’s top campuses as “small, ivy-covered North Koreas.” It turns out, in an anxious age of “micro-aggressions,” “trigger warnings” and multiple new gender variants, the punitive PC culture is literally making students mentally ill. The widely read September 2015 article in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” revealed that what is happening on today’s college campuses, especially with regard to policing speech and punishing “offenders,” is “likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.” Wow, and all for only $60,000 a year!

So, what about those white middle-aged Americans dying from “an unprecedented rate” of suicide and drug overdoses? Turns out, according to another New York Times report, that’s the same age group for which divorce is now skyrocketing! As the Daily Mail summarizes in its headline: “Over 50s fuel U.S. divorce revolution: Record number of older couples break up with a quarter now splitting up later in life.” That is depressing – which just may be why women in their 40s and 50s are so prone to being diagnosed as depressed, with an astonishing 23 percent of them – almost one in four – now taking antidepressants.

One more wrinkle: The Princeton researchers claim the white, middle-age suicides and drug-related deaths tend to occur more frequently among the less well educated, who, the study says, are suffering “the most financial distress” during today’s pathetic Obama economy. Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you elevate a Marxist revolutionary to the White House and place him in charge of the most successful and powerful free-market economy in world history.

But enough of statistics and studies. Let’s just gaze directly at this extraordinary situation in the bright sunlight of America’s traditional Judeo-Christian values and sensibilities, and we’ll clearly discern how the political and cultural left have corrupted the American mind and soul.

Question: Do you think telling Americans, in a multitude of ways as today’s culture and education system consistently do, that God does not exist has no effect on their mental health and happiness?

Do you think aborting almost 60 million American children in the four-plus decades since the Supreme Court legalized it in 1973 – and the not-subtle message this sanitized slaughter sends throughout society about the lack of sacredness of human life – has no effect on people’s mental health? Do you think a mother’s sudden realization that she has ended the life of her own child – a realization that often dawns immediately after the “procedure” is over, and it’s too late – exerts no negative impact on the health and happiness of the tens of millions of mothers who have experienced this trauma?

Do you think the legalization of marijuana in state after state, creating a celebratory atmosphere around pot and other drugs, doesn’t contribute to drug dependency, not to mention growing psychosis – especially when today’s marijuana is known to be many times more potent than in decades past?

Do you think, in the Internet age, that ubiquitous graphic images and videos of intimate body parts and hard-core sex – images that intrude and are indelibly burned into the minds and souls of tens of millions of young and old alike – does not awaken and feed a very dark nature, and exacerbate all manner of personal, relational, marital, and mental health problems?

Do you think, for America’s military members, that having a president who – let’s just say it – hates America and therefore logically cannot have American soldiers’ best interests at heart in his decisions as commander in chief, wouldn’t cause tremendous stress and morale problems in the armed forces, possibly even contributing to growing levels of alcohol and prescription drug abuse a Department of Defense study says have exploded into a “public health crisis”?

Do you think the miserable economy that results when a far-left, capitalism-hating president tries to reshape the world’s most powerful and successful free-market economy doesn’t drive some people toward drug dependency and suicide? Not being employed when one needs to work causes great stress, fear, guilt, insecurity, and feelings of inadequacy and desperation that can easily lead to escape into drugs and alcohol.

Do you think indoctrinating and pressuring young children to affirm that two men kissing or getting “married” is perfectly normal – or that forcing teenage girls to shower with boys who are under the delusion that they are girls – has no long-term effect on their mental health and happiness? When, as happens today in America, openly gay and lesbian schoolteachers emotionally manipulate classrooms of four-year-olds to embrace the idea that two men or two women marrying each other is wonderful – and make these same children feel ashamed, as though they’re somehow bigoted and hateful if they don’t embrace this – those teachers are brainwashing your children.

There are many other examples that could be cited here, but suffice to say this process of confusing, corrupting and demoralizing the greatest nation on earth has been ongoing and, of course, long precedes Barack Obama. Indeed, Americans could not have chosen as their leader someone as transcendently unworthy of the presidency as Obama without first having allowed their minds and hearts to be captured. Through constant indoctrination, intimidation, and emotional manipulation (as well as being continually rewarded once they have “converted”), a sizable part of the American electorate has been programmed over the course of decades by a subversive school system, an equally perverse “news” establishment, and a shameful and degrading culture.

Of course, at the very nucleus of the myriad assaults on traditional America is the rejection – at least by society’s elites – of God and the repudiation of the Judeo-Christian values that have long undergirded our civilization. This in turn has led to pervasive societal disintegration and a Pandora’s box of endless and unimaginable problems. Many have lost hope, and hopelessness leads easily to self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse and even suicide.

But our situation is far from hopeless. Indeed the entire last section of “The Snapping of the American Mind” focuses on specific recommendations as to how we might find genuine healing on a national, local, family and personal level.

We have allowed a lawless government and godless culture to rob us of many things, including that most precious of commodities during hard times: hope. Many Americans are losing hope that a vexing, painful, conflict-ridden life can get better.

But hope is always nearby, as  it is a gift from God irrespective of our outward circumstances.

In the final analysis what we all really need to do – as Dr. Ben Carson often says – “isn’t brain surgery.” We need to reclaim what is rightfully ours, starting with our God-given values, our faith, morality and integrity and practice them in every moment of our lives. Then, just maybe, we’ll be properly fortified and strengthened and blessed to take back our culture, our institutions, our constitutional government and our great nation.

Just don’t tell me it’s not possible. With God, all things are possible.

SPECIAL OFFER: Get your copy of David Kupelian’s “The Snapping of the American Mind: Healing a Nation Broken by a Lawless Government and Godless Culture” – autographed and personalized – at a special discount at the WND Superstore!

Also, get Kupelian’s culture-war bestseller, “The Marketing of Evil” – now available in paperback – and the acclaimed sequel, “How Evil Works,” also in paperback – all available, autographed by the author, at the WND Superstore!

 

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