* In a 23 day period in January there were 11 school shootings. That’s about one every other day. These kids have given up on life and their elders have given up on them. When they aren’t killing classmates they are killing themselves. The point: This doesn’t happen anywhere else, not even in Afghanistan or Iraq.
* In many countries in the world on can get opioid pain killers without a prescription. The point: Only in America is there an epidemic of opioid use and misuse. We have mass self-medication of the hardest of hard drugs.
* There is a growing population of “nomadic retirees.” These aren’t the people free of all need to work who have bought RVs to live out their lives wherever they want. These retirees are indeed wandering from place to place, but they’re living out of their cars and looking for work. The point: Other countries may not have old age pensions, but they do have strong social bonds. The community takes care of everyone. In America extreme capitalism has blown apart our social bonds.
* Americans appear to not be disturbed about these things.
If these pathologies happened in any other rich country — even in most poor ones — people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly.We have become a predatory society.
The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.
Haque explains these issues aren’t just unique in the world, they appear to be unique in modern history. They aren’t statistical quirks, they are extreme outliers. They aren’t visible until compared to the rest of the world and to history. These and many other pathologies are a part of an American collapse.
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