Restoring Societal Health, Functionality, and Prosperity

Why does America finds itself in disarray today?

What are the causes of our nation’s obvious current social dysfunction, increased crime, and mental illness? Simple? Maybe, but there has been a considerably long list of events over decades which have led up to today’s dysfunction. An increased percentage of homes in our nation have become dysfunctional. But why? To my regular readers who know my career history, my exposure to children and their families, along with other factors known as common sense, observation, and reasoning, and life has taught me some of the anecdotal indicators, which I believe confirms this.

Considering the fatal stabbing of a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte, North Carolina at the end of August, which was not revealed by city officials until only a few days ago, our society appears to have reached a threshold of intolerance and frustration to our out-of-control circumstances. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the DOJ will seek the maximum penalty for Brown, saying that the Aug. 22 attack was a "direct result of failed soft-on-crime policies that put criminals before innocent people.” What has happened that we’ve gotten so far away from being the cordial, courteous, thriving and prosperous culture in America?

Now, just hours ago, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a college event in Utah! I pray for his family; lovely wife and two daughters. Dear God! Police thought they’d caught the man responsible for the shooting, but later released him. So, we need to pray in support of the police finding and apprehending the culprit. We await accurate and responsible news later.

I could cite a lot of statistics, charts, and other indicators, but that would most likely turn into a small book. Most post readers aren’t inclined to bother reading that in-depth kind of content, so I’ll boil it down to my own conclusion based on the factors referred to above, as I conclude my life in my seventies. However, there’s one chart which I cannot exclude; it says too much about this post’s topic:

I ask the reader of the above chart to pay close attention to the two extreme ends; white on black vs. black on white for violent incidences. It says it all about the truth, which negates what the left insists on claiming. (This chart is NOT implying or inferring anything related to today’s tragedy. It was included prior to Kirk’s death.)

Some of the major factors I’ll cover in this post are as follows; marriage, the family unit connected to it, economics, employment, and governance. These are larger issues involved. I’m sure there are other factors which influence societal functionality, but for the sake of brevity, I shall restrict my comments to them.

Let’s start near when I was born as a “baby-boomer.” Our culture as a country post WWII was one which essentially was, “Okay, we’ve sent out boys overseas in two theaters, beat them both, and those who came home wanted to settle down, get married or continue it, have children and raise them, get employment and buy a home.” As a toddler in the late fifties, my next older brother and I played outside all the time, rode our bikes along highways to school and watched black & white television shows like Lassie. (A collie dog w/ a boy and their adventures together each week.) Despite the hardships, my family was a tight knit family that stuck together through tough times as I grew up.

Our elected government representatives were responsible and tackled paying down the national debt from fighting that war, while they enjoyed the economy mushroom from a strong and growing financial arrangement known as Bretton-Woods. The U.S. dollar became the world exchange king and America became the dominant driver of manufacturing in the world. (Today, US politicians run multi-trillion-dollar deficits and couldn’t care less. The national debt has surged past $37 trillion and is projected to climb by another $25 trillion over the next decade.) More specifics on that later.

Meanwhile, the family unit predominantly had the mother of the home at home raising the children and sending them off to school while the father was bringing home wages to maintain financial stability and the household became the driving engine of prosperity. Manners at home were considered crucial to maintaining social functionality. Ann Landers used to write a daily column which appeared in almost every newspaper of the day, about proper etiquette - acceptable interaction behavior - in most every aspect of home and public life, because it was what past generations understood was important to maintain a civilized society.

Today, we’re all too familiar with how a larger percentage of our culture maintains an attitude of every man or woman for themselves; an attitude that has people telling each other to “Fuck off!” if there’s the slightest adverse circumstance between them and another individual. Cursing and swearing was not as prevalent while I grew up in the sixties. And that’s the mild level of negative conduct/interaction in society today.

Sure, there was crime and what were then called “hobos” who today are our homeless, but neither were as bad as they are today. Law enforcement kept a civil society’s lid on criminals. D.A.s of cities and A.G.s of states were tough on crime because they knew what the outcome would be if they didn’t; the taxpayer demanded and expected this from our taxpayer paid police and law enforcement sector.

A massive change in the sixties influence our nation’s culture when Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963 and beyond. This event changed the common American citizen’s view of our national intelligence community at the federal level. Combine that with the onset of increased drugs being brought into the country and the greater involvement of our military in foreign conflicts on the other side of the globe; Vietnam and the threat of communism.

President Johnson, who was V.P. when Pres. Kennedy was killed, implemented the Great Society by getting Congress to pass bills creating welfare to support those households which couldn’t provide for their children due in part to the parent’s lack of skills to work. This created an economically dependent sector; especially in the ghettos of large cities consisting mostly of blacks. However, as our current V.P. points out in his book, Hillbilly Elegy there were also the white poor as well who became enslaved to the welfare programs which have spent trillions over several decades and have not predominantly improved their lives, with few exceptions.

Combined with the increased divorce rate – which consequently increased the percentage of fatherless homes and the resulting need for the mother to either get employment and be gone on the job while their child(ren) were “latch-key” – the hippie movement produced a new moral standard of free love in the late sixties centered in San Francisco and led by Timothy Leary, the movement’s idol and guru, promoting drug use to teens; “turn on, tune in, and drop out” was his slogan.

Those families which managed to keep things together produced young adults who were overwhelmed with the cultural changes which swept the nation and decency into a sliding decline over the next several decades. I also think that the loss of young life due to participating in Vietnam tore young boys and families apart, giving the siblings and young of that generation less of a reason to believe in God and faith. We didn’t win that war like we had in the past and it poked a giant hole in the bubble of prosperity that was America’s legacy of winning.

During the Reagan administration, one of the biggest changes which impacted our society and has increased its impact on us today, is the shift away from mental institutions in response to the deinstitutionalization movement. Quoting from an article linked below, “After the deinstitutionalization movement began in California in the 1960s, many state mental health hospitals closed, forcing many folks who needed a lot of care onto the streets.” As I understand it, the idea was that state and local communities would pick up the treatment of mental illness cases. This didn’t happen as it was intended. I believe this has resulted in the increased crimes committed by those within society by the likes of those who’ve failed to be adequately treated; like the assailant on the light rail in Charlotte, NC. An article from a professional in the mental health field, I’ve quote above, wrote about it with more specifics, and one can read it here.

Then, 9/11 happened and for the first time, America had been attacked by terrorists from the middle-east. It was a wake-up call which produced the passage of the Patriot Act. Well meaning, it also created some negative consequences for the citizen’s freedoms and liberties. Another major impact on our public schools was the passage of a bill, which meant well, but failed poorly at improving education; “No Child Left Behind.” As an educator in the classroom during the remaining years after, revealed that it didn’t create the promised outcome in getting it passed through Congress.

During the Obama administration, race baiting became the focus through assorted incidences such as the professor Henry Gates being misunderstood by the police, Trevon Martin’s death, and Ferguson, Missouri and Michael Brown’s death, along with other incidences of a similar type. Because he was the first black president, the media went along with the mantra that he preached and never questioned what was behind those words of “If I had a son, he would look like Treyvon”. To do so would have been blasphemous and the administration would have called them racist for pointing it out. The culminating event of this type was the George Floyd death in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2020. With the resulting BLM and “defund the police” movement, we now find our cities, like Chicago, as areas where crime is so rampant that most people don’t even go into the inner cities these days.

With such a timeline of events over seventy or so years illustrating what’s changed in our country, it’s no wonder that we find ourselves in such a current mess that Pres. Trump is having to deal with. Especially with crazies like 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr. stabbing an innocent young woman; a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska. If we dig into the story, Decarlos’ mother ASKED for him to be put away as he was suffering from schizophrenia. He beat up his sister. Even his own mother knew he was dangerous. This fact was affirmed during the FOURTEEN TIMES that he was arrested and let out of jail. The race baiting has worked so well that judges do not keep people in jail based on their skin color for fear of being called racists themselves and “contributing” to the “problem’ that our jails are “filled with more people of color” than whites. It’s disgusting what these judges have enabled.

What has outraged many about this death is that the City Mayor of Charllotte and the press were quiet about it for several days. Imagine if the roles were reversed, and the assailant, say a Daniel Penny type, who did this to a black woman with a stabbing from behind. We would have heard about this within an hour of it happening and strung along by the media for days. Here’s what the White House’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on this very issue.

It’s clear that mentally ill people who are roaming our streets need to be dealt with appropriately if law-abiding public is to be safe from future assaults and deaths. Instead, those we’ve elected are arguing on the losing side of this particular issue and defending it by using the race card! I just saw that GoFundMe pulled a fundraiser for the killer- thank God. People actually believe that black people can do no wrong because they’ve been sold a bill of goods with the media covering up crucial details about George Floyd’s situation and showcasing police videos that affirm the narrative simply based on the color of people’s skin. When you operate in race, all you see is race. (Which is why Mika Brzinski doesn’t understand the whole illegal alien thing. She thinks they’re just going after brown people)

Will our culture correct itself? Only if the media starts to turn around and report all the facts. With the reported news of Gen Zers turning back to some of our cultures former focuses, there’s hope. For the sake of the nation’s future and the youth who are inheriting it, I sure hope so, for their sake!