This is a 30% increase from 2019 and a 450% increase from 1999. If you want any further proof that America is a nightmare hellscape, here it is on a platter. It's so bad that a record number of people across all age groups are checking out ahead of time, preferring a drug overdose to another second of life.
Each individual who dies of a drug overdose has their own circumstances that led them to that decision, but only systemic forces can explain away a 450% trend. We've ratcheted up and ratcheted up the pain of life, while stealing away and stealing away the joy, to the point that a large number of people have thrown in the towel and do not think life is worth living anymore.
Overdosing is of course only one option among many to self-destruct. The far more common option is to not reproduce, which is painless and doesn't trigger any instinctual fearful self-preservation defenses. Then there's the truly bold who straight out commit suicide. And a giant sea of people who eat and drink and smoke and screw in an unhealthy manner which terminates their life if not immediately, at least quicker than the alternative. Even people who get involved in gang wars and end up dying by homicide, you have to wonder how much of that was really a desire to sell drugs or settle vendettas and how much of it was simply hoping to be finished off as soon as possible? Blacks must know their line of work isn't very safe and doesn't have any good endings, but they do it anyway. Why? If you stay out of that kind of stuff and away from those sorts of people, the murder rate in America zooms from 'highest in the world' all the way down to 'as low as Japan.' People could live if they chose to live, but they choose to die instead.
I do not particularly care about random Americans being crushed by despair and offing themselves in a variety of creative manners. But what I do care about is the statistical chance that my own children or grandchildren or whoevers could suffer the same fate. I want a country where, if you bring a child into the world, they don't have to immediately run a dozen gauntlets -- from the likelihood of being sexually abused which is above 20%, to the likelihood of overdosing on drugs, to the likelihood of catching herpes, or whatever. I just want them to be safe. I want them to run through wheat fields playing tag, not away from gay choir singers.
I think it is a basic human right for parents to be able to have children and not worry about them. I think it is a basic human right for a parent to die before their child. I think it is a basic human right for a child to have a better life than their parents. In any sane world, where a parent can accumulate capital for their entire lifetime to be passed down, and technological advances can be moving on for another century, no child should ever inherit a worse future than their parents' past.
To secure these rights, nations are instituted amongst men. When a nation fails to secure these rights, it is the right of the parents, it is their duty, to abolish such governments and institute new ones which they deem serviceable towards those ends.
The overdose rate is a metric, it tells us there is something wrong with the system that isn't delivering the promise life offers and has given to so many generations before us. Why is it that only now do so many people wish to die? Why is life five times as bad now as in 1999? Or 100 times as bad as 1920 or whatever? What is this overdose rate trying to tell us?
A policy bent on stopping the importation of fentanyl doesn't help any. Now the people who prefer death are stuck living. This doesn't help anyone. We need to address the root causes of drug abuse, and that's people's despair. That's life not giving them anything to live for. We can surmise what people lack now which they had before by comparing how people lived in the past versus now.
People in the past were paired up -- one man one woman -- almost immediately after leaving high school. They would be married, have jobs, and have kids, by the age of 25. This was clearly a meaningful and rewarding existence because no one was overdosing, overeating, or blasting each other back then. Safety was taken as a given and kids could roam all over town without oversight. Everyone had lots of friends but very few lovers, divorce and affairs were scandals and extremely rare and extremely frowned upon. Labor force participation among men was near 100%. And your job wasn't pushing papers around, it always had some real material outcome by the end of the workday. You could trace and see what exact good you were doing in the world, whether it was building a car or picking up the trash. The minimum wage and median yearly income was higher than it is now. A man could earn enough for a house, a car, and a large family all on his own without a college degree. And if you did go to college it was cheap enough to afford with a part time job at McDonalds.
We were still on the gold standard so inflation was extremely low. It was easy to find a high real return on your savings so the elderly had nothing to fear. People could work at the same job for decades without fear of being laid off.
Are you starting to get a feel for why no one was electing to overdose back then? You can stress one issue or another being more pertinent, but the point is there was an entire way of life, a system of living, a culture, that for one reason or another worked. It worked for almost everybody. It clearly worked for everybody because no one was opting to die instead.
In America today, a record number of people are choosing to die via overdose. And a record number of people are choosing to die by other means, too. It all amounts to the same thing in the end. This means all the 'progress' we've made in the last century has actually been 'regress.' Every change, all the changes together, have done nothing but kill half the country and make the other half miserable but not quite dead.
People can say no-fault divorce is progress. They can say gay marriage is progress. They can say gender-affirming surgery for kids is progress. They can say women in the workforce is progress. They can say affirmative action is progress. They can say dropping the gold standard is progress. They can say drug legalization is progress. They can say teaching critical race theory in school is progress. They can say open borders is progress. But they cannot change the visceral reaction people actually have to these changes. They cannot change the fact that due to all their wonderful progress, we've somehow still ended up with worse numbers on every single metric of human health.
The only real progress in the world, where things are demonstrably better than they were before, is in East Asia, where most of our 'progress' never occurred. Over there, stuff like gays and transgenders are rare and rarely celebrated. Divorce is still rare. Drug use and crime are practically unheard of. People get jobs based on merit, not racial or sexual quotas. No one is educated to hate themselves. Their pay is way higher than it used to be 20 or 50 years ago. Borders are still tightly closed and populations homogeneous. All the progress we've heralded has passed them by. And yet the progress of their world is clearly visible every day. New, incredible architectural and engineering works. Whole new cities sprouting out of the ground like mushrooms. Computer chip making technology that now surpasses our own. All the best works of art in every imaginable field -- television, movies, video games, books, comics, whatever. Even in America the typically highest selling book is Kimetsu no Yaiba, Boku no Hero Academia, Shingeki no Kyojin or whatever. There's nary a western title to be heard. Only 6% of generation Z doesn't know what anime is.
So what are we to believe? Objectively speaking? Supposedly America has experienced tremendous progress, far more than any other nation on Earth, we are the most enlightened, free, and non-bigoted country on Earth. We have the openest borders. We accept the most refugees. We have the most cutting edge (literally!) transgender rights. Blah blah blah. We even emptied our prisons and abolished the police, letting people mourn George Floyd however they found appropriate for a year.
But by any metric of quality of life, length of life, or just existence of life (i.e., birth rates and the declining number of white Americans in America), we aren't progressing at all. We're regressing. Into a nightmare hellscape. Don't take the adjectives from me. No one overdoses willingly. No one goes and kills themselves until life is a nightmare hellscape first. Happy people don't act like Americans do. It's just like how runaways don't joyously run away from home and become street prostitutes because they think it would be so much fun. They do it because the alternative is even worse. They overdose because the alternative is living in America. Overdosers are runaways too. They're fleeing this world you made them live in, that your policies have designed.
I am not whining subjectively about my own life. As I've said before, I have a top 1% way of life compared to the rest of Americans. I am objectively noting that Americans, if they were happy, would not produce press releases like, 'new record, 2020 saw a 30% increase in overdoses to 93,331!' I am casually noting that all this progress isn't amounting to what it hyped itself up to be. That liberals have not delivered on their promises. Every time they said they were helping us, they've instead driven more and more people to death and despair. Liberals have been in charge for the past century, every single cultural and legal change has been according to their design. The proof is in the pudding. Everything they believe is not only false, but perniciously fatal. They are killing us in a massacre that neither the black death nor the Mongols could match.
When an innovation fails, instead of doubling down on the mistake, we should backtrack and go back to what was already working before. This is normal in every other walk of life. Why can't we do this in politics? Why can't we take back every liberal reform since 1900? Why must we persist in the most damaging mistakes of all while we're free to change up our sports strategies or video game strategies or any other strategies in anything else? When New Coke didn't sell like Old Coke did, do you know what Coca-Cola did? They stopped selling New Coke and went back to selling Old Coke. It worked like a charm. They did not lecture Americans on being backwards authoritarian Nazi science deniers. They didn't shame us, censor us, browbeat us or coerce us into getting the damn New Coke. They just went back to the old Coke recipe!
In other news, a new chapter of Kitakubu has been scanlated, so it looks like we might finally get to the see the ending of this manga after all.
Also, I finished Yuuki Kusakabe's route in To Heart2. She had super-long black hair and Rina Satou's voice (the same as Misaka's). So if you ever want to imagine what sex with Misaka sounds like, well. . . Next I'll aim for that hairclip librarian girl.
The median playthrough count in my music hall of fame has finally inched up to 88. Only 2284 songs left to clear the hurdle.
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