A Fox News report (ref) on 3/14/23 indicated that the Center For Disease Control and Prevention (A 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey) reported that 57% of U.S. teen girls “felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021.” This was double that measure for boys and the highest level reported in over a decade.
Furthermore: “While all teens reported increasing mental health challenges, experiences of violence, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, girls faired worse than boys across nearly all measures”. More than 40% of high school teens said they were “so sad or hopeless that they could not engage in their normal activities for at least two weeks.”
Of Teen students who identified “as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning, 52% had recently suffered poor mental health” and 22% had attempted suicide in the past.
A “stark increase in harmful experiences among teen girls” was noted. Almost 18% “experienced sexual violence in the past year”, an increase of 20% since 2017. Nearly 30% of girls “had seriously considered about attempting suicide”, an increase of close to 60% from a decade ago. Almost 15% said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27% since 2019.
This news, that was also reported by other more liberal sources should be terrifying to all Americans. These traumas and resulting psychological problems are very difficult to treat and recover from.
These teens are destined to be America’s future parents and leaders in little more than 10 short.
The following long quote is from one of the greatest Psychologist of the 20th century, and perhaps of all time. This is the stunning truth about the problems that face all humanity. As a professor, I read this warning to nearly all of the students taking my classes for over 30 years. It has a prominent place in the book I am writing entitled: The Psychology of America’s Decline: And How Reverse It.
I have not blogged in many days, I am too busy working on this book. I may not get it finished and published before I am finished. We shall see about that!
Regarding the past and present quality of our environment and the quality of life for all, Skinner wrote the following (p. 5) in his 1971 book entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity, published by Alfred A Knopf.
The daily battle to keep people alive as fentanyl ravages San Francisco’s Tenderloin
Street teams focused on harm reduction offer Narcan, meals and other support to those experiencing homelessness and addiction
Erin McCormick in San Francisco with photographs by Balazs GardiSat 23 Apr 2022 06.00 EDT
It’s 9am in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and sleeping bodies line the sidewalks as Felanie Castro sets out on her route in Glide Foundation’s harm reduction van.
Along Ellis Street,hungry people queue up for the Glide’s daily breakfast of buns, hard-boiled eggs and plastic-wrapped muffins. Down the block, a fire department truck, part of a city response team, awaitsthe day’s first drug overdose call.
This neighborhood and the adjoining South of Market (SoMa) district have become ground zero in an opioid overdose crisis that is killing thousands of California residents, including many experiencing homelessness. In the past two years, more than 1,300 people have died of overdoses in San Francisco,a rise driven by the emergence of fentanyl, a super-potent synthetic opioid that’s 50 times stronger than heroin. Nearly half of those deaths have occurred in these two hard-hit neighborhoods alone.
Castro and Glide’s harm reduction team are fighting one front in the battle to keep people alive.
Glide Foundation, the parent organization of San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, has beenadvocating for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised communities since the 1960s. Today Glide runs dozens of programs, including support for those struggling with homelessness and addiction.Armed with supplies such as clean syringes, glass pipes, alcohol wipes and bottles of water, their team aims to give people the health tools to make drug use as safe as possible, while working to build the trust that drug users may need to eventually seek help.
Among the most powerful tools in their arsenal are nasal spray bottles of Narcan, each containing 4mg of the life-saving opioid-reversal drug naloxone. Castro says she has already reversed 50 overdoses using Narcan, in the Tenderloin and around the city.
But she can’t save everyone alone. As part of a broader harm reduction strategy, providers are offering Narcan at clinics, meal programs and homeless drop-in centers and distributing it directly into the hands of drug users and anyone living around them, increasing the chances someone can act.
“The idea is to have Narcan available everywhere,” said Laura Guzman, a senior director at the National Harm Reduction Coalition.
Left: The Tenderloin neighborhood. Right: Felanie Castro in front of Glide Foundation. Photograph: Balazs Gardi/The Guardian
As the Glide outreach van pulls up to a collection of tarps and tents under the shadows of a freeway overpass that morning, Castro and her partner, Rizzy Spoer, call out to the occupants, who appear to be sleeping inside.
“Hi, sorry to bother you. We’re from Glide. We have harm reduction supplies and basic needs stuff. Do you need anything?”
A bearded young man in a baseball cap comes out and asks if he can have some “longs” and some “shorts”, referring to two different sizes of syringes.
Castro loads a paper bag with the supplies and offers some water. Then she calls to the soft-spoken young man as he turns to go back to the tent: “And also, do you have any Narcan in there?” The man gratefully takes a single-dose Narcan dispenser wrapped in foil packaging.
A historic neighborhood faces new crises
The Tenderloin, a historic neighborhood in the heart of San Francisco’s downtown, comprises roughly 50 square blocks, most builtjustafter the 1906 earthquake. During the 20th century itsgently slopingstreets and residential hotels developed a reputation as the city’s seedy underbelly, known for drug dealing, sex work and vice.
Today the Tenderloin is grappling with the interlocking crises of homelessness, poverty and addiction. It’s home tohundreds of people trying to survive without housing,many living just steps from glitzy high-rise apartments, luxury brand shops, and the headquarters of tech companies such as Twitter and Uber.
The city supervisor Matt Haney, who represents and lives in the district, describes it as a place of last resort for people who have fallen through the social safety net.
“The Tenderloin is a place where people who have been pushed out, stepped on and who are struggling can find a home and refuge,” he said. “That’s a powerful and beautiful thing. It also brings with it a lot of need.”https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2022/04/archive-zip/giv-6562roHGIyIJEGMK/
In recent years, new forces have intensified those challenges. One is the rise of fentanyl, now the substance of choice for many illicit drug users in San Francisco. Another is soaring rents and a statewide housing crisis that experts say has pushed even more people on to the streets.
Resolving the situation has become one of the city’s most divisive issues. Facing mounting pressure to act, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, declared a “state of emergency” in the Tenderloin in December 2021 – promising a crackdown on drug dealers, more interventions for users and cleaner streets.
The declaration reignited a debate at the heart of drug addiction treatment: should users be given “tough love” and urged to abstain from drug use? Or should the city make drug use safer and help people rebuild their lives at their own pace?
Opinions range, with some in favor of the abstinence-based approach, a philosophy often associated with America’s “war on drugs” era, and some who want the city to use a firmer hand to clear the Tenderloin of visible drug use and encampments.
People in the Downtown Streets program, which assists people who have experienced homelessness, clean the Tenderloin in March.Ramona De La Torres, a worker with the San Francisco Drug Users Union, a harm reduction organization that distributes syringes and other supplies to make drug use safer.
In contrast, harm reduction advocates say widely accepted scientific evidence shows this strategy is ineffective at reducing addiction in the long term. In addition to placing people in supportive housing, they believe the city should open supervised spaces for people to use drugs, so they can receive prompt medical attention in the case of an overdose. Slowly building relationships, they say, helps people get into treatment and ultimately heal.
“Harm reduction is sort of the flip side of criminalizing drug use,” said Glide Foundation’s CEO, Karen Hanrahan. “We practice harm reduction to save lives and to reduce disease, but also because it builds relationships with people who we can then wrap our arms around and help them through a continuum of other services that they need.”
Harm reduction started as an underground movement distributing clean needles to drug users during the Aids epidemic of the 1980s, said Dr Daniel Ciccarone, a professor specializing in addiction medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The mantra, at a time “when injection drug users and men who had sex with men were not only ignored, but were vilified”, says Ciccarone, “was meeting people where they’re at – not judging them, not disciplining them, not telling them what they needed to do.”
Those principles now formmuch of what we think of as drug treatment, he said, from the use of medicines like methadone and buprenorphine to help wean people from opioids, to the counseling that helps people rebuild their sense of dignity. And for the first time, harm reduction became part of federal policy when the Biden administration included it as a pillar of its plan to stem national overdose deaths.
“It started scrappy; it started low-budget and it started underground,” said Ciccarone, who worked with street activists in the 1980s trying to stop the spread of Aids. “It has grown to become legitimate, accepted, funded and politically approved.”
‘I’m scared to death of fentanyl’
Proponents of harm reduction are putting their methods up against one of the greatest tests yet as fentanyl floods the US drug market.
In California, the number of fatalities attributed to fentanyl jumped by more than 2,100% in five years. In San Francisco, overdose deaths hit a new high of 711 during the first year of the pandemic, with those experiencing homelessness facing some of the highest mortality rates.
A man smokes fentanyl in the Tenderloin.
According to Alex Kral, who has been interviewing opioid users for decades as part of his work with the non-profit research institute RTI International, many heroin users have switched over to fentanyl – which is being both injected and smoked – because it’s a cheaper and quicker high. But the drug’s extreme potency means that even longtime opioid users can quickly go into a breath-stopping overdose.
That’s made distributing Narcan even more urgent. While there’s no silver bullet for the crisis, experts say many more would be dying without it.
For example, in 2021, after climbing precipitously for three years, the number of overdose deaths in the city decreased slightly to 650, a period that coincided with Narcan resuscitations ramping up significantly – from 4,300 in 2020 to 8,200 in 2021.
Several months ago, Laurie Rudner, a former Tenderloin resident, saw for herself just how fast fentanyl can take someone out.
A friend was sitting in front of her in a wheelchair when he took a hit of the drug. Almost instantly,she saw the drink he was holding drop out of his hand. Fortunately, Rudner had been given some Narcan. She pulled it out of her bag, and she and another friend rushed to their fallen companion and squirted the Narcan up his nose.
Arlen Fernandez, a Gulf war veteran, in the Tenderloin. Fernandez recently got housing with help from the city. Photograph: Balazs Gardi/The GuardianMike Brodeur has been struggling with opioid addiction since his teens. He worked in a demanding position as a towing company manager for many years but is now unhoused and feels like there’s no help available for him. Photograph: Balazs Gardi/The Guardian
An ambulance arrived quickly and administered several more doses of the antidote and, pretty soon, Rudner’s friend was breathing again and on his way to the hospital.
“The main problem right now is fentanyl,” said Rudner. “There have been like two deaths a day.”
While the drug is killing everyone from Hollywood celebrities to high school teenagers, it has posed a particular threat to people experiencing homelessness, driving a doubling of deaths among this group during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a UCSF study.
One big difference between the late 1990s and now, said Kral, is that back then only about 30% of all injection drug users surveyed considered themselves homeless. Today, the figure is 75% to 80%.
He believes the difference is that much of the cheap, marginal housing – like $20-a-night hotels, warehouse spaces and abandoned buildings – has disappeared and been replaced by high-rise condominium buildings fetching top dollar from tech industry employees.
Laurie Rudner in the Tenderloin. ‘The main problem right now is fentanyl,’ she said. Photograph: Balazs Gardi/The Guardian
“People no longer have places to be,” he said.
Reginald Dillard Sr, 65, says what he sees happening on the streets now terrifies him. Born in San Francisco, he has lived in the Bay Area his whole life. After his family lost their West Oakland home in the 2008 housing crash, Dillard said, “I did a few too many drugs and I ended up on the sidewalk.”
Dillard spent years living on the streets in the Tenderloin before he got help from a city caseworker and, four years ago, moved into a subsidized one-room apartment in an old Tenderloin hotel. Now he surveys the street scene around Glide from a distance, looking sharp in a white and blue windbreaker, jeans and a baseball cap.
“I’m scared to death of fentanyl,” he said. “It don’t take but a match head’s worth of that stuff to put you out for good.”
Twenty-nine-year-old Eletise Niumata has experienced those dangers first hand. Sitting in a wheelchair a few blocks from Glide, she places pink fentanyl powder on a square of tin foil and holds a lighter underneath, inhaling the rising fumes through a straw-like tube.
Left: Reginald Dillard Sr in the Tenderloin. Right: Luxury housing in high-rises sprouting on the edge of the Tenderloin. Photograph: Balazs Gardi/The Guardian
Between puffs, Niumata explains that her name means “electricity” in her ancestral homeland of Samoa, a place she visited twice while growing up in San Francisco. In recent years, both she and her younger sister have faced homelessness. She’s been trying to get into housing, but hasn’t managed to yet.
Niumata says she’s overdosed and been revived by naloxone two or three times. With Narcan, “everybody can help out. If you need some, probably somebody has it.”
Harm reduction on the frontlines
Recently, the city opened a “linkage center” in the Tenderloin, providing a place for those without housing to get respite and hook up with services such as treatment and housing referrals. The center offers hot meals, restrooms and showers – and people are allowed to use drugs in a fenced outdoor area, a decision that not everyone agrees with.
Since the linkage center opened in January, 35 drug overdoses have been caught and reversed with Narcan, according to a statement from the city’s health department.
Finding housing for people who visit the center has been a much slower process. The city’s website shows that as of 10 April, the linkage center has received 28,984 visits and provided 1,220 referrals to services, yet the city’s housing data for the project show only 99 people have gotten housing, with another 71 placed on a priority list. The linkage center made an additional 366 placements into temporary shelter beds.
In Glide’s outreach van, Felanie Castro is trying to make a difference one visit a time.
The van comes equipped to provide testing for Covid-19, HIV, hepatitis C and a variety of sexually transmitted diseases. The team also passes out lots of bottled water, feminine supplies, snacks, and self-heating meal kits, in varieties like “rotini and kielbasa sausage in a spicy sauce”.
Naaman Harris, left, and his friend Myrin. Harris moved to the Tenderloin from the east coast recently. He heard it was an easier place to live without housing. Photograph: Balazs Gardi/The Guardian
Smoking supplies, including tin foil, straws and glass pipes, are increasingly in demand. Distributing the materials has raised controversy at the federal level – after conservatives erroneously charged that federal money was going to be used to pass out “crack pipes”.
But no federal funding goes to glass pipes, and Castro dismisses criticism that her work encourages drug use. “We’re not just here to give out stuff,” she said. “Everything we do out here is public health. We want to lower the barriers to getting help. That’s my job: lowering the barriers to physical health or mental health.”
Once a week, a doctor from the city of San Francisco’s street medicine team rides along in the harm reduction van and offers medical services to anyone who wants them. The mobile doctors are even able to start people on drug-assisted treatment,a method favored by harm reduction specialists, that can help them get off opioids without the excruciating withdrawal symptoms.
Frank Vaccari, who now lives in a residence hotel in the Tenderloin, credits the earliest form of medication-assisted treatment available in the United States, methadone, with getting him off heroin and off the streets more than two decades ago.
“I couldn’t get off cold turkey,” he said “When I tried, it was horrible. You couldn’t eat. You couldn’t sleep. You’re throwing up. Your eyes are ready to pop out of your skull. The physical effects go on for weeks. Then there’s the mental effects.”
Frank Vaccari at the lobby of the Alexander Residence, a building that provides affordable housing. Photograph: Balazs Gardi/The Guardian
Vaccari, 63, goes to the methadone clinic three days a week to pick up his treatment, which comes in the form of a pink syrup, which he said “tastes nasty, but works real good” to stave off withdrawals.
Many other people he knows have died of overdoses. In January, Vaccari found his younger brother dead of a fentanyl overdose in his own apartment.
As Vaccari steps out on to the Tenderloin’s Eddy Street in his purple pajama pants to give his chihuahua, Cleo, a quick walk, he credits the harm reduction philosophy for keeping him alive.
“Methadone saved my life,” Vaccari said. “I would have been dead years ago.”
This article was amended on 23 April 2022 to clarify the affiliation between
Stopping The Wreck: Professor’s Research Builds A Case That We’re Losing The Battle To Save American Society
By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994
This is the continuation of this newspaper series explaining my research and data-based conclusion that America’s culture and society was in decline. It is now in a very steep decline.
In the first paragraph below, the author reports that, when he interviewed me, I was tentative about my conclusions and had not published any papers. Since that time I published three articles in professional journals and am now working to finish a book, The book has a working title of “The Psychology of America’s Decline: Reversing the Down-Fall”.
There is nothing tentative about my position on our American cataclysm in 2023.
The time for change is growing short. Our opportunities to avert disaster are being frittered away every day. Mawhinney can’t foresee and won’t guess how long it could be until our burdens overwhelm resources. He even hedges on his own theory; he won’t call it anything more than “tentative” or “provisional”, and he hasn’t published any papers on it yet.
But he is willing to say the key to surviving is to manage our own cultural evolution in a way that no other culture ever has. We need to learn to measure our own cultural health by keeping tabs on crime rates, birth rates, and marriage and divorce statistics, among other indexes.
The media and government need to dwell on these statistics the way they now dwell on economic indicators.
And finally, society as a whole will have to figure out how to encourage behavior that helps it survive.
“With regard to our own culture, we must work swiftly. Critical….indicators, imperfect though they may be, strongly suggest that time is not on our side,” he wrote in the draft of one paper.
And he can’t even guarantee that it isn’t too late already. “We must work diligently, though the full benefits of our own labor may have to await the emergence of…cultures which are yet to live”.
This is the end of this 1994 article.
I hope these article have stimulated your thinking with the goal of improving America’s chances of surviving long and well into the future. This in an increasingly hostile and dangerous world. In a democracy, more accurately a Constitutional Republic, the voters get exactly what they deserve. We deserve better than America’s failure. Please: VOTE ACCORDINGLY AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY!
Stopping The Wreck: Professor’s Research Builds A Case That We’re Losing The Battle To Save American Society
The following is a reblog from 2/13/13. It is an article about my research into America’s Decline. As I re-read it, I have a greater sense of foreboding than ever. Tom
P.S. Mr. Caylor is a better writer than I can ever hope to be!
By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994
This is the continuation of the newspaper article explaining my research and theories on America’s decline.
Part Five
Entropy
Now you see what he sees: Children comprise an ever-smaller part of our population. That means the foundation of society a generation from now also will be a smaller portion of the population.
Meanwhile, the elderly are increasing faster than any other part of the population. Today’s children are to become tomorrow’s working population, helping to support a larger number of retired people.
So much depends on this proportionately smaller group of kids, yet enormous numbers of them are living with unprecedented stresses: high rates of divorce among their parents. The pervasive availability of drugs, an increasingly violent world, both in reality and fiction; and widespread physical and sexual abuse, just to name a few.
What’s this country coming to? To answer that question, Mawhinney borrows a concept from physics: entropy.
Entropy is the amount of energy no longer available in a system to do work. It’s used more loosely, by everyone from science-fiction writers to creationists, to refer to the tendency of systems to run down: machines breaking down; stars dimming, cooling and winking out; living things aging and dying.
As Mawhinney uses the term “entropy” it means the amount of energy not available to maintain a social and cultural organization.
Maintaining such organizations, from individual families all the way up to nations, takes a tremendous amount of energy. On the other hand, neglecting them and letting them run down is quite easy.
Put another way, screwing up your kids doesn’t take nearly as much energy as raising them well. As more screwed-up kids grow up, they burden one layer of institutions after another: schools, public welfare agencies, charities, hospitals, police departments and prisons, for example.
As these institutions struggle under increased case loads and greater demand for their services, more people in need suffer. Schools must spend more of their energy catering to dull-witted or disruptive children. Charities are spread thinner. Social workers can’t do as much individual counseling as they’d like. Hospitals have to raise prices for paying patients to treat the indigent. And so on.
Beginning in their teen-age years, these children–neglected or abused themselves–start bearing or fathering children. Those children, in turn, start out life with the odds raised against them. And the cycle feeds on itself.
Sure, a lot of people are raising fairly healthy, bright, secure children while this is happening. But a greater share of their energy is being consumed by the widening wedge of the population that is maladjusted in one way or another.
Maybe their energies are tapped directly–if they’re teachers, police officers, for example. Or maybe this decay in society only drains them indirectly, because they pay more of their taxes or their charitable donations to treat it, or because they’re scared to go out at night, or because they leave a well paying job to live in an Idaho cabin and get away from the whole mess.
Mawhinney’s vision is this: At some point, the stress of trying to cope with an increasingly large share of dysfunctional people could cause the collapse of our culture and our society.
We might all finally see the urgency of change, and we could throw everything we have at the effort, but it will be too little, too late.
The species would no doubt survive. Some other culture, social organization and government would replace the one we know. But Mawhinney doesn’t see any reason to believe that what would replace a wrecked America would be better.
In the next, part six, the focus is upon the “closing window” of opportunity to save America.
The following is a reblog from 2/3/13. I humbly submit that I see evidence everywhere that confirms my dire predictions. It truly pains me to say this. Tom Mawhinney
By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994
This is the continuation of the newspaper article explaining my research and theories on America’s decline.
Part Four
CONTAGION
No one is raised in utter isolation, and people–particularly children–are influenced to an extraordinary degree by what happens to them and around them.
Just as people can spread a cold or the flu among themselves, so can behavior spread.
“That thoughts, emotions and actions can spread from on individual to others is a well-established fact…we have all felt the powerful contagious influence of someone’s yawn and also their happiness, sadness, fear or anger,” Mawhinney said.
“For example, individuals who were born and raised in the circumstances of the ghetto may move into a peripheral area to sell drugs. The greater availability of drugs in this new area will then lead to increased rates of addiction within that segment of the population. Increasing rates of addiction will, in turn, lead to the spread of incompetent and damaging behavior patterns such as juvenile delinquncey, robbery, murder, child neglect and abuse, family disorganization, child abandonment, intellectual impairment and underachievement, and more,” he said.
Although there’s debate over whether sex and violence depicted by the media lower sexual standards and encourage violence, the argument’s over in Mawhinney’s mind.
He’s satisfied that what we see, read and hear influences us, whether it’s news or fiction. He’s convinced by research linking acts of violence on television with increased aggression in toddlers. He’s particularly adamant about the influence of sexual depictions, or worse yet, the intermingling of sexual and violent themes. Sometimes he shows parts of “I Spit on Your Grave” to his students to show them–in stomach-turning detail–an agent of contagion.
“You can go to the video-rental store, in the horror section, and you can see simulated anal rape…and assault by a woman getting even for anal rape. You can see her cut the penis off a man in a bathtub with blood going everywhere and him shrieking…this is contagion,” he said.
As The population increases and as a greater share of the population clusters in urban areas, the density with which people pack together makes contagion a greater risk, he argues.
“I’m just suggesting that the more dense the population, the more likely that the alcoholic’s behavior will impact on more people. The child molester, the pedophiliac, will have hundreds of victims…I think population density is catalytic to contagion, period.”
In the next part five, learn how the mechanisms of Sociocultural Entropy weaken the viability of our Nation.
The following is a short essay sent to me by a patriot friend. Many thanks to Mr. Damaske.
It is a powerful display of America’s sad condition: Naming, in my view, many of the moving parts of Americas Great Decline.
V. Thomas Mawhinney, 2/13/23
Nations think they’re eternal.
Nations also have seasons, but where is the glory that once was the United States of America? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world. We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year.
Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution. The so-called potus in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, ‘Dr. Jill’ had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.
We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels. The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (‘You know – The Thing’) correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago.
Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets. Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims.
We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $30-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our ‘entertainment’ is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash.
Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive. Patriotism is called an insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in. How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lock-downs, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit.
How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?
Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win
Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay
Refusing to guard their borders and being inundated by an alien horde
Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule
Allowing indoctrination of the young
Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy
Losing national identity * Indulging indolence
Abandoning God, faith and family – the bulwarks of any stable society.
In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease. Only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.
We who believe in America are at this moment in time, needed to stand up to restore the U.S. to its former glory, or let it fall! However, we may now soon experience the next step in our country’s demise and I believe that it might be closer than we think!
By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994
This is the continuation of the newspaper article explaining my research and theories on America’s decline.
The following is a reblog from 2013, VTM
Part Three
MORE CHILDREN AT RISK
At the same time, as the numbers of children younger than 6 are shrinking in proportion to the population as a whole, these youngest children–a critical population segment–are being subjected to increasing stresses.
Although the poverty rate has remained fairly steady in the population as a whole, it’s rising among the youngest children. A greater percentage of them than ever before live in poverty.
It is estimated that divorces and annulments per 1.000 children in the United States increased by 173 percent between 1950 and 1984. From 1920 to 1984, estimated divorces and annulments per 1,000 women increased 169 percent.
Among scientific researchers and laymen alike, there is growing certainty that children from broken homes suffer developmental and emotional problems that can affect them for decades.
More and more children are being born and raised in single-parent families , and, with rare exceptions, two parents have more time and energy for the demanding job of rearing children than does a single parent.
Even many two-parent homes aren’t what they used to be. As more mothers enter the work force, fewer and fewer children benefit from growing up with a full-time parent at home. The quality of day care varies dramatically, but few children with paid caretakers receive that same kind of intensive nurturing that families could provide.
The rate of premature births and percentage of babies with low birth weight has remained roughly steady since 1960. The difference today is that we’ve developed the means–at enormous cost to society–to save many more of these tiny babies than we used to.
But once we’ve saved these smaller, more fragile babies, they often compete with full-term infants at a physical and intellectual disadvantage that continues throughout their lives.
Teen-agers continue to harm themselves, both physically and intellectually, with high rates of drug and alcohol abuse.
By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994
This is the continuation of the newspaper article explaining my research and theories on America’s decline.
Part Two
FEWER CHILDREN, MORE ELDERLY
Mawhinney’s theory begins and ends with children. The condition of children today foreshadows the shape of society decades from now, and what he sees isn’t good.
Children younger than 5 are a smaller portion of our population than ever before. In 1900, 12 percent of Americans were 5 or younger; in 1986, 7.4 percent of the population was in that age group. By 2010, that number is expected to fall to 6 percent.
Meanwhile, the 25- to 64-year-old age group is increasing its share of the population, but slowly. Mawhinney calls this young to middle-aged group the “culture-sustaining” portion of the population. They are working, paying taxes, raising children–in short, doing the bulk of the work involved in maintaining society.
And the elderly comprise an ever-growing share of the population. Most of them are retired and collecting much more in government benefits than they’er paying in taxes.
Much of the culture-building work the elderly could perform–helping with child care and passing on knowledge, tradition, ends up not being done, because many grandparents don’t live close to their grandchildren.
In the next part, learn how an increasing percent of our decreasing population of children (our future) are at increased risk for various bio-psycho-social problems.
The following is the result of an interview that I did with the author many years ago. I will put the series that were published here for you as “re-blogs”. I invite you to read them and decide if you think that my predictions and great fears have been unfolding in America; or not. Please share your opinions by writing them in my comments sections. To leave a comment; just click on the blue tab at the bottom of this post. Tom, 2/3/23
By Bob Caylor of the News Sentinel, Fort Wayne In., November 17, 1994
Part 1.
V. Thomas Mawhinney, chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University-South Bend, believes that American society as we know it is nearly a goner.
For seven years now, he’s been trying to prove it. He’s been grinding through thousands of pages of statistics, books and research studies, looking for patterns and evidence that support what many feel: Things are getting steadily worse.
Now he’s making his case.
Why now? Because he thinks we have little time to stop the decay of American society. At some point, would-be social engineers won’t be able to stop the train wreck; they’ll just be taking notes as the carnage unfolds.
“I need something that’s simple enough for people to grasp. I’m trying to introduce 250 million people standing on a railroad track to the train that’s coming..to see whether they can organize themselves in time to jump out of the way.” For now, he’s not overly optimistic.
“A rat pressing a bar will not change its behavior because of rewards or punishments unless there is a real close connection–ideally, a half second or less–to the action. I’m not so sure that human beings are any better when it comes to making decisions about the future.” The ideas at the center of his bleak theory of social decay are really pretty simple.
He says the corruption in society–murder, rape child neglect, drug addiction, child molestation, beating, robbing, and the thousand other varieties of misery–don’t spawn in a vacuum. They can spread from one person to another, like rot in a piece of fruit or flu in a crowded office.
As more and more people “catch” evil–or, as he might put it, exhibit maladaptive behaviors–the good have a harder and harder time holding their own.
Here is how he thinks it’s happening.
Please see Part two, to be blogged soon.
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 2/10/13
P.S. 2/3/12, I will correct the author on one point here. I invested equal effort to find disconfirming evidence, even rewarding my students it they could find such evidence; as I did for evidence to confirm my judgment about America’s increasing rate of decline.
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