Here Are Some Long-Term Trends That Are Slowly Killing America… – Investment Watch

by Michael

Just about everyone realizes that this country is way off track at this point.  Our society is very rapidly deteriorating all around us, economic conditions just keep getting worse, and our politicians in Washington appear to be more corrupt than ever.  But even though so much is going wrong, there is very little agreement about what is needed to set things right.  In fact, this nation is now more divided than I have ever seen in my entire lifetime.  So even though Americans are feeling increasingly negative about themselves, the country and everything around them, there is absolutely no consensus about where to go from here.

When I checked the Drudge Report earlier today, the very first headline at the top of the page was about a Gallup survey that discovered some very alarming things about the state of our mental health…

Americans’ positive self-assessments of their mental health are the lowest in more than two decades of Gallup polling. In all, 31% of U.S. adults describe their mental health or emotional wellbeing as “excellent,” the worst rating by three percentage points.

Another 44% of Americans rate their mental health as “good,” and the 75% combined excellent and good rating is the lowest on record and 10 points shy of the average since 2001. In addition, 17% of U.S. adults describe their mental health as “only fair” and 7% as “poor.” The latter figure is the highest in Gallup’s trend.

Of course those numbers are just part of the story.

A previous survey that was conducted by CNN found that approximately 90 percent of all adults believe that there is a “mental health crisis” in the United States today…

An overwhelming majority of people in the United States think the country is experiencing a mental health crisis, according to a new survey from CNN in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Nine out of 10 adults said ​they believed that there’s a mental health crisis in the US today. Asked to rate the severity of six specific mental health concerns, Americans put the opioid epidemic near the top, with more than two-thirds of people identifying it as a crisis rather than merely a problem. More than half identified mental health issues among children and teenagers as a crisis, as well as severe mental illness in adults.

It is almost impossible to get 90 percent of Americans to agree on anything, but in this case CNN discovered something that almost all of us can agree on.

Our mental health is in really bad shape, and it appears that this is particularly true among our young people…

In June 2020, the CDC released data that suggests one in four adults ages 18 to 24 have considered suicide. And according to the recently released Harvard Youth Poll of 2,513 Americans ages 18 to 29, 51% of young Americans said that at least several days in the previous two weeks they had felt down, depressed or hopeless.

So what happens when we are feeling down, defeated and depressed?

We go to the doctor and get some pills.

In 2020, it was being estimated that 45 million Americans were currently on antidepressants, but that number is undoubtedly even higher by now.

But even though tens of millions of us are on “happy pills”, society as a whole just keeps getting less happy.

Could it be possible that other long-term trends that we have been witnessing are directly related to this crisis?

In recent years, church attendance and church membership have both been absolutely plummeting in the United States…

In-person church attendance plummeted by 45 percent in the pandemic, according to an ABC News analysis. Most churches have reopened, but not all congregants have returned.

“People are not getting together much, generally speaking. Not just in church, but in the village,” said Thomas Groome, a professor in theology and religious education at Boston College. “People are staying home. They’re on their cellphones. They’re on the Internet.”

The share of Americans who belong to churches dipped below half in 2020, a historic low, according to Gallup polling.

Church membership held steady at around 70 percent of the U.S. population from the 1940s through the 1990s. Membership plummeted in the new millennium.

And according to a recent Gallup survey, the percentage of Americans that “believe in God” has dropped to an all-time low.

In early America, just about everyone believed in God, and just about everyone belonged to a local group of believers.

As a result, the United States was happy and prosperous.

But now Americans are turning their backs on God at a staggering rate, and attacks on Christian churches “have nearly tripled in the last four years”…

Attacks on Christian churches have nearly tripled in the last four years, according to a 84-page report released by Family Research Council (FRC) in December.

Between January 2018 and September 2022, FRC found 420 documented acts of hostility against 397 separate churches in the United States.

Once upon a time we were a Christian nation, but now much of our society is openly hostile to the Christian faith.

At this point, faith has been basically eradicated from our public schools, and as a result we are now raising a generation without any moral foundations whatsoever.

Welcome to California pic.twitter.com/HlO8yduWU4

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 21, 2022

We are rapidly becoming a “Mad Max society” where anything goes.

Crime is out of control all over the country, and open air drug markets operate freely in many of our major cities.

The federal government is still trying to limit the flow of drugs, but at this point the amount coming over our borders is absolutely overwhelming.

This year, the DEA seized enough fentanyl “to kill every single American”…

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration is out with an astounding statistic: federal drug agents have seized enough doses of fentanyl this year to kill every single American.

The United States population right now is about 332 million. In 2022, U.S. fentanyl seizures by federal drug agents have been 379 million doses.

That is more than enough to kill every American, according to Drug Enforcement Administration officials who are pointing to that astonishing stat as they try to put a stop to an overdose problem in this country that the I-Team has been focusing on for years.

Of course the DEA is only able to intercept a very small fraction of the fentanyl that actually comes across our borders.

Right now we are dealing with the worst drug crisis in the entire history of our nation, and it is getting worse with each passing year.

In this article, I have only touched on a few of the long-term trends that are slowly killing America.

Everywhere you look, things are not going well, and one recent survey found that 65 percent of all Americans currently believe that our country is on the wrong track…

By 65%-26%, Americans say the country has gotten off on the wrong track, not headed in the right direction. At the end of last year, those surveyed said by 57%-30% the country was on the wrong track – not exactly a measure of national exuberance but a less dire assessment of the future as a new year approached.

I truly wish that I could tell you that things will get better in 2023.

But that wouldn’t be the truth.

In fact, things will soon get much, much worse.

For individuals, bad decisions lead to bad consequences.

Needless to say, the same thing is true for entire nations.

The United States as a whole has been making tragically bad decisions for decades, and now we have entered a time when we are starting to reap what we have sown.