AMERICA IN CRISIS: 12.24.22 - America’s Rapid Decline

What Is Happening To Our Wealthiest Cities Clearly Demonstrates America’s Rapid Decline- by Michael Snyder - http://endoftheamericandream.com/what-is-happening-to-our-wealthiest-cities-clearly-demonstrates-americas-rapid-decline/ The largest cities in the United States are becoming cesspools of crime, drugs, violence and homelessness, and no matter what “solutions” our politicians come up with theproblems just continue to get even worse. Sadly, this is even happening in the wealthiest cities in the whole country. New York City is the financial capital of the entire globe, and over the past two decades San Francisco has been swimming in giant mountainsof tech industry money. But today the streets of both cities look like something out of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. If things are this bad while economic conditions are still relatively stable, what will those streets look like two years from now wheneconomic conditions are far worse? New York City has seen some pretty rough times in the past, but the Big Apple has never had as many homeless people sleeping in shelters than it does right now… New York City’s homeless problem does not appear to be getting any better. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, the numbers have actually hit an all-time high. They claim the average number of people sleeping in a shelter every night climbedto nearly 66,000 in October. It is far more preferable to sleep in a shelter than it is to sleep in the streets, because violence in NYC has escalated to very frightening levels… Fatal stabbings and slashings are up an alarming 37% in the Big Apple this year. The NYPD has logged 96 blade-involved killings so far in 2022, compared with 70 for the same period in 2021, according to department stats obtained by The Post. Stabbings and slashings overall are up 10% in 2022, with 4,344 compared to 3,954 last year, the stats show. Meanwhile, the downward spiral that we are witnessing in San Francisco is incredibly alarming. I recently watched footage of what downtown San Francisco currently looks like, and afterwards I was truly at a loss for words. WATCH: https://twitter.com/i/status/1603195116356657152 Have things really gotten this bad? Part of the problem is that the office buildings downtown are much less occupied these days thanks to the “work at home revolution” that began during the early stages of thepandemic… Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America. On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy,while the vacancy rate has jumped to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019. Another major factor is drug addiction. Right now we are witnessing the worst drug crisis in the history of the United States, and it just keeps intensifying every year. In fact, the number of drug overdose deaths among our teens actually “doubled from 2019 to 2021”… Drug overdose deaths among US teens doubled from 2019 to 2021 – even as use of illicit substances declined – as fentanyl fueled a nationwide crisis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today that teenage overdoses increased 109 percent over the two years. Deaths caused by fentanyl alone increased182 percent. Once upon a time, the United States was such a lovely place to be. But now our communities are degenerating into rapidly decaying hellholes and our streets are filled with violent predators. Have you heard about a new trend called “jugging”? From coast to coast, predators are patiently watching potential victims and they strike as “they juggle smartphones and car keys in parking lots or at home”… A new crime trend is targeting the distracted and the elderly, with police warning about it from Alabama to California. The big picture: Jugging involves thieves staking out unsuspecting victims at banks or retail stores before following and robbing them while they juggle smartphones and carkeys in parking lots or at home. But of course not all predators will be satisfied with just robbing you. When a 20-year-old pregnant woman was taken in by a 36-year-old man after being kicked out of her home, she was initially relieved to have a place to stay. But that sense of relief didn’t last long… A 20-year-old pregnant woman was kicked out of her house around Thanksgiving. Her luck appeared to be make a holiday rebound when a stranger offered her a warm meal and aplace to stay. However, this was anything but charity. Michael Barajas, 36, is accused of subjecting the young woman to unimaginable depravities over the course of three weeks. It turns out that this particular predator actually had his teeth filed down into sharp points. He literally looks like he is insane, and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson is describing him as “a monster”… According to the Tri-County Times, Barajas has been charged with human trafficking, kidnapping, first-degree criminal sexual conduct, possession of methamphetamine, assaultwith a dangerous weapon, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, and felony possession of a firearm. “This guy is a monster,” said Swanson. “If you look at the teeth that are filed down and the threats of ripping out a throat, I will say no more.” Anyone with any sense never would have gone with him. But other predators can look completely innocent. For example, one 33-year-old man recently thought that he was pulling over to help a woman that was in trouble on the side of the road. But once he got out of his vehicle, two men jumped out from their hiding spots and viciously attacked him… Shortly before 11 p.m. on Wednesday, an unnamed 33-year-old man was driving along near the intersection of Hutchinson Road and South George Washington Boulevard, a ratherrural area just outside Yuba City, about 40 miles north of Sacramento, when he spotted a woman standing near a black SUV on the side of the road. She flagged the man down, indicating that she was in some kind of distress. The man pulled over and exited his vehicle to see how he could help. However, once he left his vehicle, two seemingly armed men jumped out of the woman’s SUV. One appearedto have a gun, the other had a knife. Under threat of violence, they zip-tied the driver’s legs together and stole his wallet and car keys. The three con artists then poured gasoline all over the victim and lit him on fire before they left, driving away intheir own SUV and taking the victim’s car too. This is what our country has become. We are rapidly evolving into a “Mad Max society”, and that is because we have rejected the values that this nation was founded upon. And if we stay on the path that we are currently on, things are only going to get worse. Ignoring what is happening is not going to make it go away. Social decay is systematically eating away at the foundations of our civilization, and at this point America’s decline is really starting to accelerate. ------------------- Here Are Some Long-Term Trends That Are Slowly Killing America� - by Michael Snyder - http://endoftheamericandream.com/here-are-some-long-term-trends-that-are-slowly-killing-america/ 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 gettingworse, 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 inmy 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 thestate 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 healthor 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 since2001. 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 theKaiser 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, Americansput 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 inadults. 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 2,513Americans 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 atBoston 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. WATCH: https://twitter.com/i/status/1605419372834455552 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 stopto 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 countrywas 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. ------------------------