U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy reported earlier this year on an “epidemic of loneliness” sweeping the nation, and today that’s been elevated by Hillary Clinton to “weaponized loneliness” being used by Orange Man Bad to plunder America’s democracy.
We’ll get to Hillary’s weaponization in a moment, but let’s discuss the epidemic first since the surgeon general’s report escaped my attention in May.
Vivek wrote in “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” that people have been telling him that “they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant.”
“Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’ time and time again, people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, from every corner of the country, would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.'”
“It was a lightbulb moment” for Dr. Murthy, who realized that “social disconnection was far more common than I had realized.”
Another report found that “Between 2010 and 2013, the average American spent 6.5 hours per week with friends. Following the pandemic, Americans spent only an average of 2 hours and 45 minutes a week with close friends.”
“Gosh,” asked a lonely blogger who witnessed years of pandemic panic, long-term lockdowns and school closures, forced masking, unending voluntary masking, mandated social distancing, declining marriage rates and even dating and sex among young people, the atomization of society on social media, and the popular culture weaponized against normalcy, “how did that epidemic of loneliness ever happen?”
Lonely people are more prone to anxiety, obesity, and other mental and physical health issues. It’s even a national security concern, as the military struggles to recruit from a population of young people that’s increasingly undereducated and overweight.
And guess who has the cure? That’s right, it’s everybody’s favorite hundred-million-dollar nanny: Hillary Clinton. She’s going to save Muh Democracy™, too!
The question plaguing Clinton is “how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue” like Donald Trump.
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Clearly, Clinton is trying to debunk that David Brooks column from last week — without having guts enough to mention Brooks or his column — that asked, “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?”
“We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home,” Brooks wrote, “but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.”
The “we” in this case is elitists like David Brooks and Hillary Clinton who have squandered this country’s political and social capital in a decades-long quest to feel better about themselves.
Clinton, however, blames “the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress.”
That’s right: Hillary still can’t let go of the totally debunked “Russian collusion” crap and wants her deluded readers to keep on believing that the news and social media are all right-wing.
Technically, though, it won’t be Clinton that saves us from the Orange Man Bad and his weaponized loneliness. Instead — and maybe you’re way ahead of me already — it’s going to “take a village.” You know, the same village that’s raising pubescent girls to think that they need to take male hormones and undergo double mastectomies.
Clinton — and the projection on display here boggles everything from your mind down to your toes — blames “Trump and other right-wing leaders [who] politicized the pandemic and turned public health into a wedge issue” for our current troubles. The shark from “Jaws” couldn’t swallow that line without choking.
But the crisis-by-design overreaction to the pandemic merely accelerated an epidemic of loneliness that was growing increasingly virulent for years. I’m reminded now of President Barack Obama’s bleak endorsement of just such a lonely lifestyle during his 2012 reelection campaign.
“The Life of Julia” was a series of USA Today-style comic panels representing the life of a young woman living in Obama’s vision of a better America. At every step of her life, Julia receives some kind of government benefit, but never do we see Julia’s life enriched by friends or a husband, and only once by her child.
It’s a lonely life, being a serf on Washington’s feudal estate. But don’t worry: under Hillary Clinton, there will be a government program for that. The Department of Loneliness will be massive, for sure, and if it does for loneliness what the departments of Education or Energy have done for education and energy, we’ll all die of it.
If you’ll allow me to paraphrase Homer Simpson, “Here’s to government: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
Except for the part where it’s the solution.
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