Amidst all the discussion of excess deaths–whether they exist, how many, how to measure if they exist and how many there are, what are the causes, including CV-19, vaccines, missed care, etc.–is a tragedy in plain sight. No matter what, we are seeing record and high numbers of deaths among young people in the United States. This caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which ran a story regarding the topic on Thursday. The Journal story is based in part on research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this year, which I covered in a post. (WSJ Story)
As the story notes, the increase in deaths among young people has nothing to do with CV-19. It has everything to do with drug overdoses, suicides and homicides, largely driven by the lockdown mentality during the epidemic but also by broader stresses on these young people which have robbed them of a typical childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, which God knows can be stressful enough. The Journal story gives multiple examples of how easy it is for children and young people to slide into depression and despair and end up unable to cope. We have lost over half a million Americans to drug overdoses in the last five years, most of them younger people.
I want to note that every one of these lives ended far too soon, and every one had the potential to be a person who made substantial contributions to our society and to the quality of all our lives. It is despicable and distressing that after the trillions and trillions of dollars largely wasted in response to the CV-19 epidemic, we spend almost nothing trying to prevent these oh-so preventable deaths of our youngest citizens; far, far more deaths than CV-19 caused in this group.
In fact, federal officials and certainly those in Minnesota, do everything they can to make young people’s lives even more hellish and to ignore the causes of these deaths. The federal government is literally doing nothing to stop the flow of drugs across the southern border; in fact just opens it up for entry of anyone and anything. Minnesota has done exactly zero to stop drug trafficking. We make young people’s lives miserable by bombarding them with racist bilge, gender dis-affirmation, made-up climate fear-mongering, and permitting access to general social media content that literally leads to mental health issues. Locking kids out of school not only limited educational success, but led to tens of thousands of children, particularly minority ones, dropping out altogether and engaging in criminal activities, including murdering each other. There should be no surprise about what is happening.
If we really cared about children and young adults, we would immediately close the border and devote huge resources to the capture and prosecution of illegal drug distributors. We would shut TikTok down and limit social media use by children and young people. We would return education to a focus on learning and the basics that lead to a better society–math, science, reading, writing, understanding actual history and civics. We would intervene more forcefully to eliminate gangs and keep all children in school and learning. We would empower parents to control what ideological nonsense their children are exposed to.
But one political party in this country doesn’t give a shit about children, views them as property of the state whose lives have value only to the extent they can be indoctrinated to vote for that party, and who could otherwise care less whether they live or die. You know which party that is.
It sounds like you’ll be able to enjoy some marijuana in your backyard soon. What could go wrong. The Democrats love it because it brings in more tax dollars they can waste.