The Snapping of the American Mind by David Kupelian

Author:David Kupelian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WND Books
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

HOW AMERICAN CULTURE ENCOURAGES ADDICTION

Addiction has been a problem in all nations, cultures, social classes, and historical eras. But today’s America “is in the grip of an epidemic,” writes Finnigan. “Overstating the enormity of the addiction crisis is impossible. The reality defies imagination or exaggeration.”

Although Americans taking mood-altering substances number well over 100 million, Finnigan says currently the nation has about 25 million hard-core, end-of-their-rope, drug-or-alcohol addicts. And “the conventional wisdom,” she says, “is that each of those 25 million affects seven other people through familial, social, or professional associations.” That would be 200 million Americans personally touched by addiction. Even being “super-conservative” and “cut[ting] that number in half,” says Finnigan, “twenty-five million in thrall times three people affected equals 75 million involved.”38 So, depending on which multiplier you choose, America has somewhere between 75 million and 200 million people whose lives are impacted by soul-crushing, body-destroying addictions.

Why so many?

“The nature of the epidemic is systemic,” says Finnigan, “and it is an indictment of our ability as a culture and a country to respond.”

Let’s consider our culture and our country’s role in the addiction epidemic currently engulfing us.

Often, addictions have their roots in childhood trauma and family dysfunction, and are not in themselves directly related to politics, ideology, or any other factor outside of the addict’s family and social sphere. Other times, however, culture and ideology play a central role, as in Russia, which notoriously maintains one of the highest alcoholism rates in the world. According to the World Health Organization, in Russia and neighboring countries, “every fifth death among men and 6% of deaths among women are attributable to the harmful use of alcohol.”39Let that sink in: alcohol addiction causes one in five male deaths in Russia!

What about America?

Consider this: If a nation is basically moral and decent, and if its morality and decency are reinforced by widely shared cultural, religious, and educational values that are, metaphorically, “in the air we breathe,” this constitutes a powerfully stabilizing force for each of us. It’s like a gyroscope – an external one, but one largely in sync with our God-given internal gyroscope we call conscience. The America of my youth was a good, if imperfect, example of this.

However, our society is so troubled today that, as previously noted, one in ten girls becomes addicted to “cutting,” which is both painful and disfiguring. Why do they do it? Because, as any former cutter will affirm, the physical pain of making razor cuts in her arm is preferable to the intolerable emotional pain she is experiencing. These young people at some point discover they can obtain a measure of temporary relief by injuring themselves.

What, then, is it about our contemporary society that is driving astronomical numbers of us, young and old, to suicide, drug abuse, addiction, and other compulsive, self-destructive behaviors?

Let us reason together.

Do you think telling children, in a multitude of ways as today’s culture and education system consistently do, that God does not exist has no effect on their mental health

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