20 Signs That America's Culture is Deeply Unhealthy
20 Signs That America's Culture is Deeply Unhealthy
We do not have a healthy culture
One of the problems with assessing America’s culture is the way that human beings tend to perceive the world. We are extremely adaptable creatures and what today may seem unthinkable can, decades or even just years later, seem so ordinary that people barely even notice it. It’s like fish living in a fish tank. “The castle is over there, the place we get fed is over there, the whirring thing is over there, here’s one of the edges…” but, WHY is it that way? Is it good that it’s that way? How do you know if there’s no comparison? If you’ve never traveled, never read history, if you’re not old enough to remember a different time and never had discussions with people who did, you have no way to evaluate how healthy or unhealthy the living is in your cultural fish tank.
It occurred to me that this was worth writing about based on a couple of things that were tweeted on the new and improved Elon Musk version of Twitter. The first way was this post from a guy in Qatar responding to some grandstanding jackass who wore a gay soccer shirt to the World Cup and was told he couldn’t come in unless he changed the shirt:
Qatar is certainly no bastion of culture or human rights, but is that guy wrong? Many Americans today would say “yes,” but past generations of Americans wouldn’t have agreed – and with good reason. Tolerance is a traditional American virtue and yes, it absolutely should extend to gay Americans. If you’re gay, go be gay, it’s not everyone else’s business or their problem. However, in the last couple of decades, Americans have gone all the way past finally achieving tolerance to celebrating homosexuality. We PROMOTE IT to children in the schools, encourage kids to be confused about their gender, shoehorn it into movies at every opportunity, and have even turned sporting events into yet another opportunity to shout to the world how great it is to be gay or transgender.
While you certainly shouldn’t hate someone for being gay or transgender, it’s deeply abnormal that so much of American culture relentlessly propagandizes in favor of these things. Yes, throwing people in jail for being gay is a sign of an unhealthy culture, but so is having a gay pride month featuring people in assless chaps on parade while every corporation and school relentlessly talks about how great it is for people to be gay.
This comment from a Qatari and the response from Matt Walsh also caught my eye:
Personally, I agree with him. I think America once had a culture that the whole world would have benefitted from sharing and there are still undercurrents of that culture that are worth copying. However, I wouldn’t advise ANY NATION to copy our culture wholesale today because it is so infected, broken, and degenerate that it’s very hard to say whether the good parts of our society would be of more value than the sickness we’d undoubtedly pass along with them. It would be like getting a kidney transplant from a cancer patient who you knew would pass it on in the process.
With that in mind, it’s worth laying down some cultural markers. You want examples of how America’s culture is unhealthy? Well, here’s a list, albeit incomplete (this could easily be three or four times as long), of things great and small. When you see these issues starting to be corrected, you’ll know America’s culture is starting to regain its health:
1) Abortion: Since the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, 63 million children have been slaughtered. That’s approaching ten times as many people who were killed during the Holocaust. Yes, the numbers were going down before the SCOTUS reversal of Roe vs. Wade and that’s likely to continue after the decision, but the sheer number of children we’ve murdered and continue to murder is arguably the single most monstrous act by any nation in all of recorded human history.
2) The divorce rate: Depending on which statistics you believe, roughly 40-50% of first marriages end in divorce today and the numbers only go up in 2nd and 3rd marriages. On the other hand, although it’s increasing, the divorce rate in India, for example, is about 1.1%.
3) Drug use: Americans are some of the heaviest drug users on planet Earth. The statistics are stunning.
* "37% of the population struggles with illicit drug use and 12% struggle with both alcohol and drug use."
* "66% of all Americans are actively taking some type of prescription drug. This amounts to 131 million Americans."
* "Overdose deaths tripled in the decade between 1999 and 2019 (from 6.1 to 21.6 per 100,000). Much of this increase is related to the widespread opioid epidemic that has swept the nation in recent years."
4) Authoritarian impulses under COVID: We literally had businesses forced to shut down by the government, people who lost their jobs for refusing to take a poorly tested, dubiously effective vaccine, and police harassing people in churches and on beaches for refusing to bow to capricious, obviously ineffective COVID regulations.
5) The birth rate: A society needs a birth rate of 2.1 children per couple to keep from shrinking without immigration. Currently, in the United States, ours is 1.64. In other words, our civilization is slowly dying off.
6) Marriage: Marriage has often been correctly called, “the bedrock of society.” Yet, in 2021, the average age that Americans first got married was 28.6 years old. That’s up from 22.9 years old in 1920. Meanwhile, only 45% of Americans are married. That’s down from 67.4% in 1960.
7) Victim-oriented culture: Americans are increasingly embracing a victim-oriented culture where whoever can portray himself as the most pathetic, the most hurt, and the most victimized is catered to by society.
8) Gender confusion: We now have many Americans that have personal pronouns, embrace made-up sexualities, and believe that they can change their gender at will. These false, unscientific beliefs are often even promoted to children in schools.
9) Hatred of America: Liberals in America often demonize their own country, mock patriotic people, and treat their country’s flag like a hateful symbol of intolerance. Seeing so many Americans that openly despise and want to fundamentally transform what has arguably been the most successful and prosperous nation in human history is almost strange beyond belief.
10) Race obsession: No matter how thin the connection may seem to be, nearly EVERYTHING in America gets turned into a racial issue. Farmer’s markets, trees, immigration, skiing, voter ID, national parks – it all gets boiled down to race. It’s utterly obsessive and bizarre.
11) Political obsession: When a society becomes so obsessed with politics that it’s even weirdly shoehorned into sporting events, it makes it extraordinarily difficult for the populace to continue to get along. If even sports aren’t a politics-free zone, almost nowhere will be.
12 Censorship: In the mainstream media, social media, and many colleges, draconian censorship has been embraced to try to shut down alternate ideas that in more than a few cases, have later proven correct.
13) Sanctioned political violence: In 2020, we saw sanctioned political violence in cities all across the country. Left-wing protesters were allowed to burn, loot and break the law at will with minimal consequences or political interference in many big liberal cities.
14) Cell phone obsession: The average American checks their cell phone 96 times per day.
15) Drag queen story hours: We’re now at a point where everywhere from schools to government agencies are trying to be involved with weird, sexually themed drag shows. It’s nothing less than an attempt to sexualize and groom children on a wide scale.
16) Breakdown of law and order: In many liberal cities, the law essentially sides with the criminals against law-abiding citizens. Criminals are allowed to shoplift without consequences, often aren’t charged or held on bail even if they’re caught and the emphasis is on restraining and defunding the police, not the criminals victimizing the populace.
17) Fake hate crimes: The desire to be considered a victim in America is now so strong that the vast majority of hate crimes turn out to be hoaxes.
18) Declining trust in institutions: Trust in many critical American institutions has cratered to some of the lowest levels in history. Just to name a few examples, only 11% of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in television news. That same number for Congress is 7%. Newspapers? 16%. Church/organized religion? 31%. Public schools? 28%. The presidency? 23%.
19) Children born to unmarried women: 40% of children are now born to unmarried women. That is compared to roughly 5% of children that were born to unmarried women in 1960.
20) Differences so great they’re increasing the chances of civil war: Various polls have found that a large percentage of Americans believe we could be on the brink of another civil war.
From a Zogby poll in February 2021:
"Nearly half (16% very likely and 30% somewhat likely combined) of likely voters believe the country will have another civil war... For once, political parties - Republicans (49% likely and 40% unlikely), Democrats (45% likely and 44% unlikely), and Independents (42% likely and 44% unlikely) were somewhat in agreement, but the fact all political stripes think a civil war is inevitable is not the bipartisanship we were hoping for."
From a YouGov poll in August of this year:
"55% of self-identified ‘strong’ Republicans believed civil war is at least somewhat likely, while 40% of self-identified ‘strong’ Democrats felt the same."
Per a poll by the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy earlier this month:
"Slightly more than half of Republicans (51.5 percent), over a third of Democrats (35.1 percent), and nearly a quarter of independents (23 percent) believe the United States is on the brink of a new civil war."
I don't have personal experience with 99% of what's on your list. Very grateful for that. But, all of it impacts me and I hate what has happened/is happening to my country. I grew up in the 50's and early 60's, and I remember a more harmonious America. No, certainly not perfect, but moral and ethical standards were the norm among average citizens. We really were a God-based country. We were even at a place where our black population was gaining a positive foothold in society, that is until Johnson's Great Society programs set them back to what has become Welfare Society, furthered demonically by far left democrats.
I hope we can avoid civil war. No man is an island, but my personal means of protection is to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible: No debt. Good health. No prescriptions required. No addictions. Comfortable with isolation. Preparedness. Armed and dangerous. Personal connection to a like-minded community if worse comes to worst. I don't want it to happen, but sometimes, rock bottom is necessary before motivation to change takes place.
Very impactful, well summarized, and amazing that this has been allowed to happen. I have to blame people like myself, who could have spoken up and resisted some of these unhealthy practices but we didn't. Like so many of my fellow Norwegian Lutherans, I just sort of went along to get along. One of my parents was a teacher and union rep, and I was raised in a very left-wing environment. By the time I realized what the heck was happening, it was too late to change course for me. With their iron grip on academia (DeVos' book "Hostages No More" is eye-opening), our chances of pulling out of this nose-dive are poor. In those likelihood-of-civil-war stats, I suppose we don't want to mention how many folks on the right might actually grasp at that, ugly as it is, as a last desperate hope to save something worth living in. Uf da. Thanks for writing this thought-provoking essay, John.