THE GREATEST, RICHEST SICKEST NATION IN THE WORLD

The many positive mythologies concerning the USA are now being shown to be false.

There was a period from the end of WWII to around the end of the Sixties when there was some truth to them.

No longer.

The sons and daughters of those who participated in the boom years after WWII who found work relatively easy to come by which had salaries whereby they could buy a house and equip it with every modern convenience, get married, start a family covered adequately by health care are finding it increasingly difficult to do any of these things.

The parents who sought a better life for their offspring have had all their fond hopes dashed as they see them under or unemployed, burdened by debt and in many cases depressed and suicidal. In increasing numbers they cannot afford to rent even modest dwelling places and are returning home.

Lifespans in America are shortening. Depression and inclination toward suicide are rising. The threat to livelihoods in the pandemic era is increasing. Mortgages remain unpaid as do rents. Bankruptcies are ever more prevalent as health care costs deplete savings and create unmanageable loans that feed into the cycle of depression and suicide.

Those in High School in the USA are contemplating suicide at every higher percentages. Substance abuse and overdoses as well as suicides are taking the lives of more High School students that Covid.

Increased isolation has resulted from a feeling there is less and less community spirit in an age of endless competitive greed.

For ten thousand years and more prior to the Industrial Revolution people largely lived in villages, within small communities.

With the Industrial Revolution came mass migration to ever-larger cities. Any spirit of community was much harder to find. Isolation, atomization, over-work, relative poverty in terms of overall well being and depression rose even as living standards rose somewhat in terms of income compared to serfdom and farming as it was two hundred or so years ago.

With the advent of the internet in our lifetimes the original concept was that we would be benefited by being in better touch with others and regain our sense of community. But, along with the demands of work being ever-greater through recent decades the opposite effect has been found. Many rarely meet others face to face, are locked within a small coterie of screentime friends and are often mentally reduced to irascible venters on all the various pressures upon them.

The USA is the crucible where the nexus of all these negative forces is at a peak.

Of course there are many factors contributing to the dangerous levels of alienation which now exist there.

The income gap between the average worker and the well-heeled elites above them has increased steadily since the boom years after WWII and in recent decades has taken off exponentially. Wages were reasonably good as WWII ended. Unions made sure of that. Slowly but surely a plethora of rights and the protection of those unions who had protected them were stripped away. Pay increases dropped below inflation over the years and now run at around 1.5%.

Increasingly Americans cannot afford even the basics of a decent human life never mind aspire to all that they were made to believe was theirs as of right, The American Dream, that if you worked hard and kept your nose clean you would have the life you hoped for, for your family, a happy life and want for nothing. That dream has died along the hard road Americans have traveled along in recent years desperately hoping their votes would change things.

Now the Covid-19 pandemic is poised to ingrain further the losses suffered during the 2007-08 financial crash. Homelessness is about to combine with joblessness and general fury over a range of other issues in a perfect storm, a black nexus of negative factors all feeding one another.

The Greatest, Richest, Sickest nation of the world is in a sickening spiral of ill-health, decay, addiction, suicidal tendencies, corporate and political corruption without end.

And an off ramp, some way out from this spiral of darkness is all but impossible to identify.

Below Glenn Greenwald relates the compelling pre-Covid-19 statistics from numerous sources regarding depression, lower life-spans, suicide/suicidal tendencies and substance abuse that plague the USA. These trends are continuing in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and set to exacerbate ever-worsening social collapse there.