According to a recent Gallup poll, more Americans are now smoking more marijuana than cigarettes.

That's progress, right?  In a poll conducted July 5 to 26, only 11% of Americans surveyed said they smoked cigarettes.  That's as compared to 45% in the mid-1950s.

Yet 16% of Americans admitted to smoking pot, 48% saying they have tried it at some point in their lives.  Contrast that to 1969, when only 4% of Americans said they smoked weed.

The tobacco/cigarette industry has been constantly harassed, taxed, fined, and demonized by government entities and liberals everywhere...whereas the production and sale of marijuana has effectively been subsidized — and almost glorified.

This may be an indication that they, too, are stoned.

A marijuana cigarette, or "joint," contains more carcinogens than does a tobacco cigarette.  Moreover, the amount of the intoxicating substance in a joint, THC, has been steadily rising over the years.  (Unlike virtually all other consumables, apparently there is no market for "light marijuana."  Quite the opposite, apparently.  And none of this is regulated.)  The long-term effects of this aren't yet fully known, but they include damage to a person's lungs, heart, and brain...three fairly important organs.

This tracks with numerous other trends — most reversals of conventional wisdom, some flying in the face of traditional morality.

To wit: Saying "all lives matter" is now considered not only somehow controversial, but racist and offensive.  Proclaiming that one wishes to "Make America Great Again" not only is frowned upon, but might trigger an FBI raid on one's abode.  All sentient and sane people wonder how this can possibly be.  

"Thought leaders" and influencers flat-out aver that all whites are racist, because of their skin color, utterly ignoring the stupendously racist nature of their own remarks and beliefs, not to mention the mind-boggling hypocrisy.

Nearly all erstwhile taboos and modes of depravity are being legitimized — and indeed lionized — even as Christianity is being mocked, altered, and demonized.

Violent criminals are being repeatedly set free without bail, yet Trump-supporters deemed guilty of "trespassing" are being held in prisons — if not solitary confinement — for lengthy and often indefinite periods of time.

The Biden administration considers other nations' borders inviolate, while effectively refusing to even acknowledge our own.  Our elites disparage a wall on our southern border, but almost without exception make certain their own properties are protected by fences and/or walls.  And often armed security, though most purport to be for gun control.  Our current leaders neglect our own aging nuclear deterrent while doing everything they can to make certain Iran has "the bomb" ASAP.

Perhaps most detrimental of all, the divine complementarity of the two sexes, male and female, is being summarily dismissed as arbitrary, unreal, a mere figment of the imaginations of white male scientists from yesteryear.  It's something simply "assigned" to one at birth (signifying nothing of note) by an overworked — and probably toxically masculine — medical professional.

We have traded independence for groupthink, education for indoctrination, pants hitched up firmly around our waists for masks hitched firmly over our faces, reason for unmoored emotion, cognitive intelligence for artificial intelligence, Main Street for Wall Street, limited government and small business for unlimited government and Big Tech, Bible study for drag queen story hour, the Founders' vision for a false socialist utopia, gratitude for an entitlement mentality...and reality for "virtual reality."

In doing so, we have traded traditional American optimism for ennui and despair.

One might well think it's time to make America great again (if it's not already too late to do so).

Just don't say so publicly, or Biden's FBI might raid your home.  And your spouse's closet.