Last Days of the USA: Millennial Edition

Y'all ever feel like the world, if not the U.S., is in its last days?   Like having kids after about the mid-80s was not optimal, having them in the 2000s was ill-advised and having a baby in any year after 2010 was flat-out a bad idea?  Like trying to get a good job and work your hardest is pointless? 

It's not your imagination.  For Millennials who graduated high school in the early 2000s & beyond, we've never experienced a normal or thriving economy & have survived one national crisis after another.  The dotcom bubble burst, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 Housing Crisis, the Great Recession of 2007-2009 & the COVID recession are among these.  Cost of living has far outpaced minimum wage and wages in general, leading to an increase in homelessness, suicide, mental illness & drug addiction.  

The U.S. is 248 years young--that's when the Declaration of Independence was signed. In all that time, we've had our fair share of natural disasters, infectious disease epidemics, wars, financial crises, terrorist attacks & more.  We're not unique in that regard, though our gun laws definitely play a role in things like mass shootings.  What IS abnormal is that the top 3 deadliest crises in our nation's history have happened during the lives of Millennials, i.e those born between 1981-1996.  There's actually a list of the deadliest disasters in U.S. history on Wikipedia, and sure enough, the top 3 have happened in my lifetime.  Also, they keep getting deadlier as we get closer to the present day--a bad sign to be sure.


Here they are in descending order:




#3.  The HIV/AIDS Epidemic

Haiti's donation rules were lax like ours--no heat sanitization or other safety measures.

Coming in at #3 on the deadliest disasters list is HIV/AIDS, which made its presence known in 1981 in a group of promiscuous American gay men.  After naming it "GRID" (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), scientists very quickly had to amend that discriminatory & wrong moniker, as it was also found in female prostitutes, babies, IV drug users, blood donation recipients & more.  And Haitian immigrants were heavily affected for some reason.  The "4H club," it was called, which stood for Heroin users, Homosexuals, Haitians & Hemophiliacs. 

That last one never had to happen; American blood donation laws have always been among the most lax on Earth, running neck and neck with places like Haiti, from whom we actually accepted a shitton of donations in the 1970s leading up to the epidemic.  It took the Red Cross & other organizations an agonizing 4 years (1981 to 1985) to exclude high-risk candidates & start testing for the presence of Hepatitis B--a near certain indicator of HIV infection in the days before an HIV antibody test existed.  Then, once we deemed our tainted blood donations unfit for use here, we shipped them overseas so hemophiliac kids in other countries could "enjoy" a slow painful death.  By "we" I mean Bayer, and yes, they knew the blood was tainted when they shipped it overseas.   Not a single CEO or company leader sat in prison for a day over this mass murder tragedy.

There were other public health factors that enabled AIDS to become the nightmare it did, such as refusal to shut down the gay bathhouses after the disease was well-known, & the spread of other STDs like herpes (which increases transmission of HIV) in the straight community in the late '70s/early '80s, but perhaps the most frustrating and harmful was our president's refusal to even utter the word "AIDS" in public until 1987.   By then, 15,100 Americans had died of AIDS & many more were infected and waiting for the time bomb to go off.  And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts, himself a victim of the virus, is perhaps the best record of the early days of the epidemic.

I attribute my germophobia and fear of sickness in part to being born in the '80s & having my earliest memories flooded with images of emaciated people wasting away with black lesions on their faces.  The public panic surrounding AIDS was unreal, especially when compared to our overly nonchalant attitude towards COVID, a far more infectious disease with a much higher death toll.  Maybe that can be chalked up to our hatred of drug addicts & homosexuals--I really don't know.  Regardless, our attitudes toward infectious disease sure have changed as a society since then.  Our government still has an "ignore it and it'll go away" mentality, which is why we remain Ground Zero for so many deadly plagues. 

As for why Haitians were so heavily affected, the country is home to many people who had worked in the Congo during the 1960s, bringing the virus from its native African place of origin to the island.  And from there it spread to the USA, which had both a high number of gay sex tourists visiting Haiti and a large amount of Haitian blood donations.  The disease's long incubation period meant that those who contracted it in the '70s wouldn't show symptoms until the early to mid 80s.  Judging by the prevalence of unsafe sex ("barebacking") and drug laws that ban needle exchange & other safety measures in the U.S. today, we didn't learn a damn thing.

Our plasma donation rules are still dangerously lax which means another blood-borne epidemic is likely around the corner.  More about that here.




#2.  The Opioid Epidemic

Fentanyl addicts sway in the breeze in Kensington, PA

Clocking in at Numero Dos is another kind of epidemic--the opioid addiction and overdose crisis.  Dates listed are 1999-present, which is an awfully long time to be fighting the same epidemic.  You'd think in all those years our leaders would've realized two things:  that pharmaceutical companies and some doctors are little more than legal dope dealers who should be dealt with accordingly, and secondly, that banning drugs only makes them more deadly by ensuring adulteration of the supply by black market forces.  We still haven't learned that 2nd lesson, with a rash of fentanyl-specific laws popping up in multiples states in the last 2-3 years.  Predictably, we now have nitazenes & tranq dope (xylazine) as replacements.  These drugs are worse than fentanyl because nitazenes are more potent than fentanyl and there's no field test for them, and xylazine doesn't respond to naloxone in the event of an overdose because it's a horse tranquilizer, not an opioid.

Our leaders' short-sighted focus on the supply while totally ignoring the DEMAND part of the equation is shameful in light of how hard they simp for capitalism.  The law of supply & demand is a core tenet of capitalism, which may as well be our national religion.  Almost no $$$ or focus is spent answering the question WHY so many Americans in their creative, productive & reproductive prime would willingly choose to become zombies & risk their very lives for a brief escape.  In light of that, I'd say hopelessness is actually our #2 biggest killer.

#1.  The COVID Pandemic

American healthcare workers wearing trash bags due to PPE shortage

If you're one of those people who thinks we shouldn't have cancelled school or that states went "overboard" with mask laws, listen up.  No other crisis in our nation's history has cost over ONE MILLION American lives--more than any nation on Earth.  The U.S. was #1 in both COVID cases & deaths for the entirety of the pandemic, which is still ongoing despite Wikipedia saying it ended in 2023.  Think about that for a sec:  we lost more people than highly populated/crowded areas like Mexico City, Brazil or India.  More than countries with poor sanitation & no indoor plumbing like Chad or Madagscar.  More than wartorn nations like Palestine or the Ukraine.  This was due in part to Trump dismantling Obama's pandemic response team only months before COVID came to be, but there's a bigger problem:  our country's abhorrent working conditions--lack of paid sick leave, vacation time, parental leave and the like.  All those things predicted our nation's idiotic and deadly attitude toward the virus, which was essentially, "Get back to work". 

When our grocery store shelves lay bare throughout the pandemic, we failed to realize that the reason was that nearly all of our goods come from foreign countries like China, India and Taiwan, and all those other countries were LOCKED DOWN.  The barges that move items like food and medication sat at port because there was no one to operate them.  As it should be when a disease as infectious and deadly as COVID is about.  Governments all over the world used taxpayer dollars to pay citizens to stay tf home during the outbreak; as a result they lost far fewer citizens than the U.S.  

Refrigerated trucks hold the bodies of COVID-19 victims

Another factor that caused COVID to be our #1 deadliest disaster is our nation's science illiteracy & distrust of medical experts--a problem that's more pervasive among conservatives & has only worsened since the advent of the internet.  The number of online outlets & other "news" sources claiming that the virus either wasn't real, wasn't as deadly as claimed or wasn't as dangerous as the COVID vaccine was disgusting.  Americans adopted an "it isn't real if I don't want it to be" mindset, as if they could simply will the virus to be less deadly by claiming it wasn't real.  A lot of people died as a result, including Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain & this trio of Republican radio hosts who died within a month of each other.  Indeed, Republicans in general died at much higher rates of the virus in part due to President Trump's dismissal of COVID as a deadly disease.  Oklahoma Republican governor Kevin Stitt was the first state leader in the U.S. to contract the virus, though he survived (much to the chagrin of many Oklahomans). 

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

As we sit on the brink of an even deadlier Avian flu pandemic, it seems we haven't learned anything from this unnecessary loss of American lives if our working conditions & attitudes toward science are to be believed.  If scientists' predictions are correct, it won't be too long until this plague comes to pass.  This deadly influenza variant kills young healthy people (ages 20-55) disproportionately, leaving only the very young and very old behind.  The effect of COVID on immune function could make the death toll from Avian flu even worse. 

The placement of anti-science kooks at the highest levels of our nation's public health institutions predicts a bad, BAD outcome once the bird flu becomes easily transmissible from person-to-person.  Loss of Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans due to Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" ensures that these people won't be able to afford medical care should they get sick, thereby sealing their fates.  Our loss of healthcare workers due to "burnout" during COVID makes the whole situation that much worse.  

Stay tuned because we could have a new #1 on this list by about next winter.  

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