Have you been there? 
I have.
Posted on 04/25/2016 4:48:00 AM PDT by HomerBohn
Are we witnessing the beginning of the end for the United States of America?
All great nations eventually fall, and the United States is not going to be any exception. Many of those that write about the decline of our once great country tend to focus on external threats, and there are certainly many that could be talked about. But perhaps even more ominous is the internal societal meltdown that we see happening all around us.
According to Real Clear Politics, recent surveys show that 67 percent of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track, and only 26 percent of Americans believe that it is headed in the right direction. So even though we are tremendously divided as to what the solutions are, the vast majority of us can see that something is deeply, deeply wrong with America.
Personally, I spend a lot of time writing about our economic problems. We have piled up the largest mountain of debt in the history of the planet, last year the middle class became a minority for the first time in our history, and 47 percent of all Americans couldn’t even pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money or selling something. But I don’t want to focus on economics in this article.
Neither do I plan to focus on our political problems. The fact that somewhere around half the country plans to vote for Hillary Clinton in November shows just how far gone we are as a nation. And the Republican Party is essentially just a watered-down version of the Democrats at this point. On average, Congress has just a 14.5 percent approval rating, and yet we keep sending the same corrupt politicians back to Washington D.C. time after time.
What in the world is wrong with us?
Physically we are a giant mess too. According to USA Today, the obesity rate in the United States has more than doubled over the past 25 years, and the OECD has found that the U.S. has the most overweight population in the entire industrialized world by a wide margin.
But our physical problems are not going to be the focus of this article either.
Instead, I want to focus on what is going on inside our heads and inside our hearts. I want to focus on our mental, emotional and spiritual problems.
Alvin Conway of The Extinction Protocol has been chronicling global disasters for years, and he has just posted an insightful piece in which he comments on the growing social decay that we see all around us…
According to Covenant Eyes, an internet search group, 1 out of 5 mobile searches on the internet involves pornography. Illegal drugs continue to be both manufactured and transported into the U.S. with no apparent way of halting or stopping the flow. In the US alone, more than 15 million people abuse prescription drugs, more than the combined number of people who reportedly abuse cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants and heroin.
If the war against drugs can’t be won, what luck will we ever have winning the war on terror? Does anyone remember who won Lyndon B. Johnson’s famed war on poverty? Regardless, let’s throw some more taxpayers’ money at an issues that money along can’t fix.
Later in his article, Conway goes on to link this social decay with the spiritual decline of our nation…
According to Pew Forum, the number of people who claim to be religious in America is declining as the country becomes more and more secular. “Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – has jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%.” The U.S. is beginning to look more and more like ancient Rome before it collapsed.
I agree with Conway. America is starting to look more and more like the Roman Empire just before it collapsed.
A nation is only as strong as its population, and right now we are quite a disaster. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the suicide rate in the United States has spiked to the highest level in almost 30 years. The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post article entitled “U.S. suicide rate has risen sharply in the 21st century“…
The U.S. suicide rate has increased sharply since the turn of the century, led by an even greater rise among middle-aged white people, particularly women, according to federal data released Friday.
Last decade’s severe recession, more drug addiction, “gray divorce,” increased social isolation, and even the rise of the Internet and social media may have contributed to the growth in suicide, according to a variety of people who study the issue.
That same article goes on to say that the suicide rate in this country increased by a whopping 24 percent from 1999 to 2014.
Is that a sign of a healthy nation?
At this point things have gotten so bad that even 70 percent of our pastors are battling depression. The following was authored by respected journalist Jennifer LeClaire…
There is no lack of statistics about pastors and depression, burnout, health, low pay, spirituality, relationships and longevity—and none of them are good. According to the Schaeffer Institute, 70 percent of pastors constantly fight depression, and 71 percent are burned out. Meanwhile, 72 percent of pastors say they only study the Bible when they are preparing for sermons; 80 percent believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families; and 70 percent say they don’t have a close friend.
The Schaeffer Institute also reports that 80 percent of seminary and Bible school graduates will leave the ministry within five years.
We are a deeply, deeply unhappy nation, and we have been trained to turn to pills as the solution.
According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 59 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least one prescription drug at this point, and 15 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least five prescription drugs.
Those are absolutely astounding numbers to me. We are the most drugged up nation on the face of the planet, and yet we just keep on getting less happy.
Here are some more selected numbers from a previous article that back up that claim…
–Back in 1987, 61.1 percent of all Americans reported being happy at work. Today, 52.3 percent of all Americans say that they are unhappy at work.
–A different survey found that 70 percent of all Americans do not “feel engaged or inspired at their jobs”.
–One survey of 50-year-old men in the U.S. found that only 12 percent of them said that they were “very happy”.
–The number of Americans diagnosed with depression increases by about 20 percent each year.
–According to the New York Times, more than 30 million Americans take antidepressants.
–Doctors in the United States write more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants each year.
–The rate of antidepressant use among middle aged women is far higher than for the population as a whole. It is hard to believe, but right now one out of every four women in their 40s and 50s is taking an antidepressant medication.
–Compared to children in Europe, children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants.
–In America today, there are 60 million people that abuse alcohol and there are 22 million people that use illegal drugs.
–America has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.
–America has the highest divorce rate in the world by a wide margin.
–America has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.
–100 years ago, 4.52 people were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.
We are more isolated, more lonely and more miserable than we have ever been before.
But does that mean that we are on the verge of collapsing as a nation?
Just like during the days of the Roman Empire, most Americans cannot even conceive of a time when America will be no more. And yet we can all see that the foundations are being constantly chipped away at.
Will we be able to survive once our foundations are totally gone?
bfl
The suicide rate is at the biggest point in 30 years.
The ‘mercun pipples hoped for mutha effin change, and their homobama fulfilled it for them.
Homobama is America’s Dr. Kevorkian.
Hmmm. Seems likely to me that you’d have seen similar poll numbers on these topics in the old USSR. So it comes as little surprise to see it here, since we’ve been sliding toward socialism for decades. Misery and fatalism are what socialism does best.
“It will never happen, but the only way to eradicate the importation, sales and use of drugs is to emulate Singapore: sellers and users of drugs are executed.”
Singapores a crap hole.
Good then elect Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia and make
everything punishable by death.
We have a drug problem in this country because our government
wants us to have one.
“The drug culture has taken over and the nation throws billions of dollars annually in a feeble attempt to curb the destroyer of minds.”
I work in health care. It has become an industry. Just as people with long lists of diagnoses are kept alive by nurses who do nothing but give out massive amounts of ridiculously expensive carefully dosed poisons aka legal pharmaceuticals to an expanding population of non narcotic and narcotic dependent population. Groups of people miserable with discomfort ad lonliness living in dysfunctional families and these are people with 50 to 80 year marriages.
And working for internal medicine doctors who, in their own generalized misery are the most miserable, abusive, dissatisfied, nasty group of people anyone would ever have the misfortune of having to deal with to keep people alive known to man. And these doctors’ misery is heightened by the realization that big money is going into health care (sick care) of the elderly and telling these doctors what to do and how to make decisions
Talk about a drug culture. No one on any regular legal mood altering medicine (pharmaceutical) should be allowed to vote.
There are a lot of people on drugs out tgere
Today’s society is the natural result of post-modernism. When nobody can know what is true - about ANYTHING - the only response to life, truth, lies... is “meh”. People can make up their own realities because perception is everything in our world.
The arguments made have little to do with sound facts or reasoning and more to do with what people want to believe. It’s a problem in our churches, in our schools and colleges, in our government, in our social media, and in our forums. The basic epistemology is not evidence-based, and that will always help the groups that are not based in reality, which also happen to be America’s sworn enemies: communists and Islamists. The more “conservatives” try to fight falsehoods with more falsehoods, the more the vicious circle spins to its natural conclusion. The process of sorting out the truth means a lot, and whenever we abort the process because we fear the ultimate conclusions, the more we seal the fate of this society and nation.
Neither Trump nor Cruz, nor Congress, nor Supreme Court, nor DOJ, etc can destroy this nation. Only the people of America can destroy this nation. And sometimes in the name of politics, we’re doing precisely that because our process of sorting out the truth is absolutely broken.
Case in point: once I hit “post” I have to wait to see if the moderators think my words are OK to be heard. The process of sorting out the truth doesn’t matter because it’s not HOW we think but WHAT we think that matters. The very thing we accuse teachers’ indoctrination of doing is what “conservatives” themselves do. And it feeds into that vicious circle that the nation is swirling in before finally being flushed.
Our nation's citizens were among the first to be exposed to massive amounts of very powerful antibiotics. Antibiotics change gut bacteria flora. And...The rest of the world ( the part that has adequate food) is catching up.
You’re getting very close
Birth control and societal acceptance of birth control is the culprit.
The logical explanation was put forth in a prediction written by a group of highly educated philosophers and theologians in 1968
Anyone who didn’t see this one coming just wasn’t looking.
In our country’s recent history we’ve celebrated diversity in our population as if it were a good thing. However, one look at world history will show you that no country with a diverse population of different races, languages, and religion has long survived.
Countries don’t naturally form with a diverse population, and when in the past they’ve occurred it’s usually been as a result of armed conquest. These unnaturally formed countries have either melded together into a single population made up of one mixed race with one language and one religion or they’ve come apart, and they’ve usually come apart with extreme violence. The longer these diverse populations were forced to coexist with one another without mixing and becoming one, the more the hatred grew among them and the more violently they broke apart, but break apart they did, or genocide has settled the issue once and for all.
Why is this and why can’t we all just get along? The truth of the matter is that we (the human race) just aren’t as civilized as we would like to think we are. Our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, isn’t that long “out of the trees” and the veneer of civilization is very thin, to non-existent, upon us all. We’re all carrying the genes that got us here and some of those genes carry a very basic survival instinct that has allowed us to survive thus far.
This most basic of all survival instincts is self preservation and it’s the one that warns us to be very wary of those who are different than us, our family, and our tribe. Those who possessed this survival instinct survived and reproduced, and those who had no fear/distrust of strangers didn’t survive. Over the years, this survival instinct has been referred to as tribalism, nationalism, nativism, ethnocentrism, racism, and various other isms, but it’s an inborn instinct carried in our genes whether we like it or not.
A “celebration” of diversity and multiculturalism in the American population was introduced in the 1960s and 70s as a deliberate, divisive revolutionary tool wielded by Marxists like Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and other radicals. It became dogma taught by Marxists in our universities, then spread by our leftist controlled news media and leftist controlled Hollywood. The intent was, and is, to split American culture along race and class lines and set off a “proletarian” revolution to destroy capitalism. The Left has now managed to elect a half-Black radical as President and their revolution is proceeding along very predictable lines, with him using every opportunity to stir up more division and discontent. A reading of the Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA at this link should make clear their goals and methods: http://revcom.us/Constitution/constitution.html
At the beginning of the 21st Century, the American people are about to learn the savage lesson of Communist Revolution that the Russian people learned at the beginning of the last century. Millions died in Russia’s Communist “experiment” before they learned that Communism just doesn’t work, as the concept of Communism (“You didn’t build that”) is completely alien to basic human nature. Now it’s our turn to learn what Russia after a century of death and misery now knows.
However, the coming American Communist Revolution that Karl Marx and his acolyte Barack Hussein Obama is bringing upon us won’t progress in the comparatively orderly fashion as it did with the Bolsheviks in Russia. The cursed diversity within the U.S. population will quickly turn this Communist Revolution into a no-holds-barred, and to-the-death, Race War. How our country with its Constitution intact could possibly survive such a blood-bath is a near impossibility. It once appeared as if our country might one day become a mixed race people of olive skinned, brown eyed, black haired, Spanish speaking Muslims, but Barack Hussein Obama has started a Communist Revolution that will undoubtedly destroy any possibility of that ever occurring.
There is no expiration date on any of our survival instincts, and white Liberal Democrats in their “Gun Free” zones will be the first among us to be reminded of this at the very beginning of our coming Communist Revolution turned Race War, as the American experiment in Democracy joins all previous Democracies in the dust-bin of history.
DJ Taylor
It’s going to be very ugly, that’s for sure.
so, are you an optimist, pessimist, realist or opportunist?
https://www.quotev.com/quiz/3344490/Are-you-an-optimist-pessimist-realist-or-opportunist/1
A kind of agree with your statement.
But first I think we should raise the voting age back up to 21 years of age. That would be a start to changing things around.
Bump!
seems to be a mistake in this,
Says that Urban is close and rural is far
Looks like rural is close and urban is far
Not to worry. Hillary Clinton is the poster girl for a svelte America.
No kidding that the elites want drugs in this country.
That is the major reason the southern border is open.
Somebody elite is getting paid off very well.
The voting age was changed, if I have it correct, I was a kid at the time and have done no research, as a politically correct move to alleviate the insult being perpetrated on our young men, drafting them throwing them into the hellhole of a war in the southeast Asian jungle at the age of eighteen.
Talk about having to make reparations. When is that going to happen? And I’m a gulf war vet
The voting age must be put back to 21. No one living under any substantial federally subsidized income should be allowed to vote for reasons of conflict of interest at least. Period
Good eye. But you get the point, right?
Have you been there?
I have.
We have already collapsed.
Just waiting to hit bottom before most recognize it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.