death rates of white middle class American males

[Eric the Green]

(02-24-2017, 12:07 AM)gabrielle Wrote:

(02-22-2017, 08:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-21-2017, 10:48 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(02-17-2017, 01:05 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I might post the next report next week. But meanwhile, what do you think are the causes of this trend?

I have my opinions, of course....

This statistic started with boomers in 1999 from the age of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to about the age of Mark Warner and Lindsay Graham, and has increased markedly since then until today for Xers from the age of Chris Christie to about the age of Marco Rubio. The line runs upward from 1999 to today for those aged 45-54.

It concentrates among those without higher education.

These are the folks who put Trump in the White House. Still enough of them around to do that, I guess.

This sickness is contagious.

Many of them have lost jobs. Many of them are using drugs and overdosing. There is increased social isolation and seclusion. Suicides are rampant.

I think culture is important; the fact that TV, music, movies are so vacuous and negative in these days of the 3T and 4T. This makes a difference. And this extends to decline of social gathering places like churches, union halls, clubs, and families of people that have moved away, with many left behind in red states because of industrial decline. Guns make suicide easy, and drugs and alcohol make self-medication and escape easy.

Americans have such empty lives that if they lose their job, they can't see any purpose for themselves. This is due to the inherent emptiness of our culture, and inability to recognize what life is about, despite the counter-cultural movements that revealed it, but were ignored and condemned in white middle red-state America. Like maybe doing some creative things: the arts, science, entreprenuership, new relationships or family, contributing to and helping others, going back to school, or moving to a blue state where culture and opportunity is greater. Unwillingness to take the financial risk of change because money is too tight. If your life is empty, and thus doesn't get you high or fulfilled on life, it's easier to take a drug or a drink to get a false and addictive high instead. Despair leads to self-destruction.

The economic stresses are caused by computer automation, free trade, and wage and salary decline due to concentration of income for the bosses; plus a failed education and cultural system, and poor social services and lack of investment in public infrastructure.

And of course, you can make the situation even much worse by taking out your frustration and despair on liberals and voting Republican, because you are brainwashed into one of their ideologies that hook you: blame the colored people, blame immigrants, blame PC and identity politics, blame women and feminism, blame non-Christians and lax morality, blame welfare recipients, blame taxes, blame gun control, and don't question the bosses, but look to them for salvation, because they are the "job creaters" and are not "dependent," or you can also fall for religious right nostrums and "make America great again!" or patriotic and militarist slogans. When your life is empty, you can't question authority or think critically and with imagination, and you are ripe fruit and easy pickins for a demagogue like Trump. The result is that there are no social services or income supports to help boost you and your community out of economic ruin and emotional despair. No, that would be dependency on big government, and I am too strong and self-reliant to do that. Oh pardon me, I need to get my fix......

America is sick, literally, and needs a great big change, and soon. Something to blast these people out of their deadly self-defeating patterns! There is a greater destiny for America, hidden in our history and our western and world culture, if only we can find it again. If only we can look past our despair and prejudice.

Eric you are looking at this through a 2T filter. RE: bold text.

If the average person loses their job, they lose the benefits that go with the job. Especially health care and dental. Plus others. They lose cash flow. If one is living paycheck to paycheck, that means immediate distress. Loss of purpose is the least of their worries.

Either there need to be enough jobs to employ those who are not knowledge workers, or, there needs to be universal income.

So far, Americans seem to be behaving more like Germany in the 1930s than America in the 1930s. The economically challenged are looking to fear and prejudice promoted by demagogues than to liberal social programs for answers to their plight. Is that because Americans today are more cultural and intellectually deprived than they were in the 1930s? They can't see the solutions; they only react to fear and prejudice.

Was Germany culturally and intellectually deprived leading up to the 1930s?  

Or was there a lot of culture, but much of the population was unresponsive, or hostile, to it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture

Either way, I guess it leads to the same thing.  But I disagree with you about the past 3 and 4 Ts being devoid of culture.

Yes, we disagree. The 3T in America was not "devoid" of culture, but often a tone of despair was evident. I think rap, punk, grunge and heavy metal are both ugly and negative in their message. It seems like it contributes to the mood of despair. I contrast them with an uplifting, melodious song from 1967 that came to my mind the other day. "Hey, 98.6 it's good to have you back again.... lovin' is the medicine that saved me...." The poor state of our TV contributes even more, perhaps. Violent and shallow. But disagree as we might about all that, I think it goes well beyond this. There is a low attitude toward education and the media in many segments of our culture, white and black and in between, young and old. Many people prefer to be uninformed. And most do not read books anymore. They may cruise and surf social media, but does that provide a suitable substitute? Philosophy and history, two of my favorite studies, are not so popular these days. There's the loneliness and social isolation I mentioned from the PBS report too. Our politics itself contributes too, of course. Negative, polarized, stalemated; it does not give much cause for hope from that quarter either. You don't see ads for heroin on TV, but lots of other drugs with lots of side effects are advertised to the hilt. And then there's the gun culture, of course. Makes suicide very handy.

Weimar culture was the outgrowth of turn of the 20th century culture, which was an epochal change of age in civilization. It guess it's no wonder that it took up where things left off since the 1890s-1910s era, which historians often agree was a turning point on a once in 500-year scale. And Europe had such a fertile foundation for vibrant culture to begin with going back thousands of years.

The article mentioned something of a resurgence of culture in Europe in the sixties. I guess the sixties in the United States did not have such an impact. 30 years later, the outgrowth of the sixties was limited to the new age and neo-pagan movements and other similar counter-cultural expressions like raves and multi-media computer arts. By the 3T, our culture had been already dumbed down to a remarkable degree. Concentration of media ownership was a major factor in this. Arguably, the anti-rational approach of the sixties itself contributed to a less vital intellectual life, along with the generally anti-intellectual, pragmatic, materialist mindset of America to begin with. So, there couldn't have been a 3T Weimar culture in the USA such as Germany had. The foundations just weren't there.

But the negative racist, nationalist currents of those times in Germany were hard to avoid, too. They had been building up for decades. Add the great depression, and they pushed the positive culture aside. Something like that has happened now in the USA, and perhaps in Europe too.

I have no info though about a mood of despair and shorter lifespans among Germans of middle age in the 1930s, such as we have in America today.