A Dose Of Reality.

I stressed not for once that America I used to know is no more. It is a different country today from what it was even 20 years ago and this latest may create in some (not entirely inexcusable) a schadenfreude moment, in others--a concern. 

Tampa (AFP) - Life expectancy in the United States dropped yet again as drug overdose deaths continued to climb -- taking more than 70,000 lives in 2017 -- and suicides rose, a US government report said Thursday. The drug overdose rate rose 9.6 percent compared to 2016, while suicides climbed 3.7 percent, said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics. As a result, the average life span in America dropped to "78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2016," said the report. The data comes as the United States grapples with a vast opioid epidemic, fueled by addiction to prescription painkillers as well as street drugs like heroin and synthetic opioids including fentanyl.

I drive to work very early in the morning and it is terrifying to see everyday many people wandering aimlessly along the highway and city streets obviously being in a drug-induced confusion. It gets worse with each year passing by. Whilst the article calls for judging this phenomenon cautiously, the statement is dramatic:

Anderson said declines like this haven't been seen since the great flu pandemic of 1918 and World War I -- though those losses were steeper.The peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s also saw a nationwide drop in life expectancy. "We're a developed country, we have a lot of resources, we should have increasing life expectancy, not decreasing life expectancy," he added. Canadians live on average three years longer than Americans. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world, at almost 84. - 'Hard to digest' -

And here is one "small" detail, it is the background against which these new (old) revelations must be judged. In one of the comments a user says this:

Alcoholic here one year sober. trust me I wanted to die. I felt that there was nothing worth living for. Thank god Someone helped me get into rehab. I could not afford to myself as i had lost y job etc. but now I am in grad school. I am a productive member of society. im sure many of you on here would just give up on someone like me, but my purpose on Earth is to help others like me.

Here is this terrifying background.

White people in the United States are dying at alarmingly early ages. After decades of lengthening life expectancies, white lifespans are now going the other way. An increasingly unequal economy — alongside steadily declining opportunities for workers without a college degree — may be the cause, two rock-star Princeton economists conclude in their just-released latest research.

We may wax "economic" whatever we want here, but there is very little doubt that a bottom line of this demographic and human catastrophe was precipitated not merely by doctors prescribing more opioids or some other technical factor, such as automation--these are merely consequences--but in the fact of America's dramatic deindustrialization and denying its own citizens (yes, primarily white working class) any meaningful jobs by giving those to somebody else abroad. US surely succeeded in growing a gigantic class of office plankton, which in itself is a generator of a vast number of psychological and psychiatric disorders, inevitable in the environment of non-productive labor. This factor matters, a great deal (why, is a separate issue), but in the end, even if to consider a viable argument that this dying out class sometimes fails to even adopt for those very few, high quality new industrial jobs, a conclusion is irresistible; highly developed, first world country is not defined only by per-capita GDP, that metric in the West being false anyway, but by the structure of GDP and, as a result, the structure of a labor force employed in productive and well-paid sectors. 

It is, of course, is a very complex issue and it is not for this short post to provide deep analysis, but the bottom line is--so called "liberal", primarily financial, globalist capitalism is in its deepest crisis and the situation with American working-class is one of those indicators. Add here hedonistic, amoral, degenerate lifestyle being promoted every day in media and you get the picture. 

The collective decline of the working class has been in motion for decades with middle class wages peaking in the 1970s. Reversing this trend will require a similar timeline. While many feel the problem in their pocketbooks, it is in their doctor’s office where the collective trauma is increasingly being felt.

Just to illustrate. The first thing one reads on Yahoo featured  headline news  page is this:

Stormy Daniels has come out to say that her lawyer Michael Avenatti sued President Donald Trump for defamation despite her urging him not to, and now she’s not sure if she’ll keep him as her lawyer. In a report The Daily Beast published on Wednesday, Daniels says she asked Avenatti for information about the crowdsourced funds raised for her legal defense and that instead of providing more information, he started a new fundraising site to raise money for her without telling her, and she found out about it on Twitter.

In Orwell's 1984 special machines were writing pornographic novels for the consumption of proles. Today we have media doing this 24/7. When the whole world around one becomes one uninterrupted pornographic showing, be that in politics or in actual, increasingly perverted, pornography, all that happening in the world of no actual jobs and no hope--many simply stop wanting to live.  I know, I see many of those early in the morning along the highway to a Telegraph Road.