Mental health in the U.S. is demonstrably degenerating.  We older adults clearly see the country being torn apart.  Our youths, "educated" by a broken system, over-reliant on social media, prescribed psych drugs, ingesting cannabis, and immersed in a fake new "reality" don't even know it's happening.

Those in charge promote and magnify the basest of human instincts.  We are becoming inured to an ugly, nightmare-like "normal" that barely resembles its actually normal predecessor.  We glorify racial division and hate through "equity," grungy homeless encampments are ubiquitous, sexual deviance is encouraged, and climate change and COVID are excuses for shuttering freedom.  Our government and the media are taking us for a ride.

There is intention in this rending of our country's values, with the goal, I think, being to destroy a free society.  This travesty is being ruthlessly enacted by those in power, both at home and among the "global elite" cadre.  They seek ultimate power and lots of money.  Our elites blithely erase historical achievements to further their nefarious goals.  They elevate the bizarre and denigrate or tear down all else.

There are myriad examples.  Recasting historical heroes as pariahs.  Intentionally destroying our energy grid and paralyzing trade and freedom of movement.  The heavy boot of COVID mismanagement, taking liberty, destroying health, and rendering small businesspeople penniless.  Borders open to a drug-running, uneducated, immoral horde, all shuttled to our cities and countryside.  Denying immutable genetic realities by pretending that male and female are meaningless constructs.  There are examples everywhere in our society.  Each aberrance hastens chaos.  If the next generation is taught to believe all it is fed, it will be lost.

Let me say that another way: I believe that the systematic destruction of childhood norms is the most destabilizing and dangerous manifestation of a wanton power-grab.  It is proving very effective.

Young human minds are malleable and impressionable, and stable, commonsense parental and societal values should anchor children as they navigate the obstacle courses of childhood and puberty to become self-respecting, productive adults.  With our current extreme values shift, a developing mind can hold on to nothing.  We are casting our children adrift in a sea of deliberately constructed psy-ops garbage meant to unmoor them, the better to recast and manipulate their minds.  It's a more sophisticated, but no less deadly in the long run, version of the type of "training" Boko Haram used with African youths, turning them into murder machines.

Image: An Oregon classroom (cropped).  Libs of TikTok screen grab.

The first step has been to wipe away all previously held concepts of ethics and morality.  How is an unformed mind, a child just figuring out who he is, expected to winnow truth from the sludge he's being fed, that he's seeing all around him?

Now it's expected, for example, that if Jimmy likes to play with girls, he must secretly be a girl, trapped in the "wrong" body.  Instead of simply enjoying a childhood of self-discovery, most likely to grow out of that phase naturally, Jimmy, following the examples before him, so decides at age 8 that he must become Jenny.  Parents and pediatricians are encouraging this.

The damage then spreads further.  The other parents at this child's school must explain to their inquisitive children that what is happening is "normal" and that their friend was "misgendered."  Suddenly, you have a rash of vulnerable children taking puberty-blockers, denying their own developing bodies, and proceeding on to horrendous surgical interventions that will destroy, rather than enhance, their lives.  How many parents know at least one child in their kids' elementary or secondary school who exemplifies this new trend, opening the pathway for others to follow?

Destabilized children become tortured adults.  Add the current "norm" of psych drugs and cannabis, videogame immersion, and social media rather than play dates and outdoor activity, and you create trouble.

Every school shooting has been perpetrated by a "misfit" child.  Each shooting was an extreme cry for help from a lost, angry soul.  It had nothing to do with the gun, but, instead, manifests horribly the mental anguish brought about by our societal abdication of simple, commonsense rules for raising healthy children.

As for solutions, there are no easy ones, but there's a great unraveling that must take place.  We must start by pulling the threads of the fabric of this new society so that we can re-weave them into something more stable.  We need the bravery to follow the great examples presented at some school board meetings, loudly saying "no" to what we know is wrong.  A multitude of us, not just a few.  We need a return to God — not necessarily religion as it is now practiced, because increasingly, religious bodies have espoused, and are preaching, the same woke drivel.  We need to remember reality, to teach our children the beauty of nature, music, art, and the richness of history.  Parents need to move forcefully to reconnect their children's schools with real education and vote out the monsters.  We cannot just "go along."  It will doom us all.