Measuring Social Pathology

There are all sorts of ways to measure social pathology. Here at meaning in history we tend to measure social pathology in terms of the prevalence of deviant anti-human ideologies. On the other hand, such ideologies have an impact on day to day life in America, as we see all around us--in our families, our local communities, our nation.

CNN offers today a very graphic measure of social pathology. Of course, they blame it on "the pandemic," and no doubt the attempted social lockdown of most of the country played a major role. However, the causes undoubtedly run deeper:

Drug overdose deaths in 2020 hit highest number ever recorded, CDC data shows

(CNN) Drug overdose deaths rose by close to 30% in the United States in 2020, hitting the highest number ever recorded, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday.

More than 93,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2020, according to provisional data released by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. That's a 29.4% increase from the 72,151 deaths projected for 2019.

"Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl) and psychostimulants such as methamphetamine also increased in 2020 compared to 2019. Cocaine deaths also increased in 2020, as did deaths from natural and semi-synthetic opioids (such as prescription pain medication)," the NCHS said in a statement.

"This is the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period, and the largest increase since at least 1999," Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement.

"These data are chilling. The COVID-19 pandemic created a devastating collision of health crises in America," added Volkow.

As in recent years, inappropriate use of opioids was behind most of the deaths. The NCHS reported that overdose deaths from opioids rose from 50,963 in 2019 to 69,710 in 2020.

...

While this pathology is certainly not confined to our major cities, one presumes that this plays pretty directly into the stunning rise in murders and shootings generally, which are overwhelmingly gang--and therefore drug--related.

Americans will have lots to think about come 2022: Pathological ideologies in our schools and public life, pathological inflation, pathological attacks on election integrity, pathological levels of crime and drug use. 

Will America step back from societal suicide?

Can We Handle The Looming Social Crisis?

What IS the looming social crisis? Well, it turns out that young people are increasingly pushing back against the LGBTQwerty agenda. That's what we learn from a Harris poll sponsored by GLAAD (the annual Accelerating Acceptance report). According to John Gerzema, the CEO of The Harris Poll, these findings are “very alarming” and could “signal a looming social crisis in discrimination.” Here are the alarming stats in a nutshell, so to speak:

the number of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 who are “comfortable interacting with LGBTQ people” dropped from 53% in 2017 to 45% in 2018, which is already a decrease from 63% in 2016. 

What could possibly be causing this? According to Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD president and CEO, the problem stems from the younger generation "coming into contact with more LGBTQ people, particularly individuals who are non-binary and simply don’t identify as lesbian or gay." Go figure! Ellis theorizes that

‘This newness they are experiencing could be leading to this erosion. It’s a newness that takes time for people to understand. Our job is to educate about non-conformity,’

On the other hand, it just might be that normals are uncomfortable with the results when America's fuzzy kinda libertarianism--America's default public "philosophy"--is pushed to its limits. Or maybe when normals find out that, actually, there may not be any real limits at all when that fuzzy kinda libertarianism is taken seriously. As Jonathon Van Maren at Lifesitenews writes, Americans reflexively thing the government should "stay out of people's sex lives," but when that notion is adopted as a legal principle those same people are discovering they don't like the consequences so much. Young people turn out to be the unfortunate guinea pigs upon whom the muddled middle in America is inflicting the consequences of their confusion:

In other words, the LGBTQ movement may have pushed the culture too far. Many people accept the idea that the government should stay out of people’s sex lives. A majority of Americans also came to believe, over the past two decades, that gay people should be permitted to get "married" (a process described incisively by Darel Paul in his 2018 book From Tolerance to Equality: How the Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage.) But most people simply do not believe that women can have penises, that men can get pregnant, or that gender is fluid. The simple fact is that to most people, “non-binary” and other ever-shifting and multiplying categories are simply nonsense. 

Young people also have a front-row seat to the chaos the LGBTQ movement is wreaking on their schools. Biological males in the girl’s bathroom, biological males destroying the female competition at women’s sporting events, the utter confusion of transgenderism, transition, and the LGBTQ indoctrination—they have lived these things, and it is notable that much of the pushback to this agenda is coming from young people, not from adults. It is teenage girls who are suing their schools over bathroom privacy and biological males in female sports competitions. Their childhoods are being turned into battlefields in the culture wars, and many of them are profoundly unhappy with this. 

... LGBT activists are attempting to use an entire generation as the guinea pigs in a massive social experiment with gender fluidity and sexuality, and many of those guinea pigs, as GLAAD’s own polling indicates, are very unhappy with it. I only hope that the pushback to the LGBTQ agenda will strengthen, persevere, and herald a return to sanity.

This widespread "discomfort" is one of the reasons that Trump surprised the nation in 2016. We have over a year yet to go before the next election, and the Dems are revealing how radical they really are, how little they care for normals. This will be interesting.

My view? I think American can handle this kind of crisis, the crisis of increasing discomfort.

UPDATE: I kinda liked this cartoon--it expresses what sundance calls the Uniparty: