My heart breaks for this country as we go through another school shooting. This time it’s an elementary school in Tennessee. A private Christian school was the target of a sick woman taking out her disappointment or anger or illness on other people’s innocent children. The two polarized sides of American philosophies will clash predictably over guns and who should have them. This is the dumbest argument that takes the least amount of thought or nuance, of course, and so that’s the one we will all focus on.
“They’re coming to take our guns!” some of us cry with genuine angst as we imagine a future where only totalitarian governments have weapons.
“Why can’t we have gun control?” cry the others who don’t understand why half the country worries about a hostile government takeover like we didn’t just live through COVID-19 lockdowns.
But no one will discuss the real problem. The kids are sick, and I mean deeply, irreversibly sick.
Related: Suspect in Christian School Shooting Confirmed to Be Transgender
Why are they sick? The culture is undoubtedly sick. Hollywood has glorified violence and horror for so many years that most of us don’t even notice we’re entertaining ourselves by watching mass killing like it’s normal. There’s something wrong with all of us, to tell you the truth. But the children have suffered most of all.
How many of them have been denied the basic necessities of a mom and dad who live together and work together to care for them in a peaceful manner? Too many. How many of them have had to watch their parents destroy their families by dragging each other to court in order to hurt one another instead of working together for the sake of their children? Way too many. In my neck of the woods, it’s harder to find an intact family than a broken one.
Broken families create broken kids. Add COVID lockdown madness on top of that, and you get kids who have been denied their normal lives for three years and have missed milestones like graduations, dances, socialization, and normal friendships. What we get after that is the highest number of mentally ill children this country has ever recorded.
Harvard University did a study and found shocking results.
Before the pandemic, about one in eight kids had an anxiety disorder; in the first few months of the pandemic, that proportion doubled. From 2019 to 2021, emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts increased by 51 percent for girls and 4 percent for adolescent boys.
What do we offer these children with anxiety disorders, mental illness, and suicidal ideation? Drugs and therapists telling them they might be the wrong gender! The drugs are bad enough. While some of them can help, they also carry risks of more suicidal ideation, aggression, and rage—the opposite behavior of what you were trying to get—if doctors don’t closely monitor them.
Then there are the therapists who actually tell children that they can be born in the wrong body (adding to the anxiety they already feel). Those therapists are the majority of “health care professionals” out there. They lead kids down a path to becoming a permanent Big Pharma patient reliant on cross-sex hormones and body-disfiguring surgeries that often go wrong, leading to lifetime pain issues.
This is the reality in which we live. These are not serious mental health professionals, and we’re in the mental health crisis of our lifetimes. It’s a spectacularly bad time for our mental health community to go bonkers, and most of them should be committed in padded rooms.
That brings us to the recent shooting. The shooter is a biological female who identifies as male. Is she on testosterone? Testosterone can induce rage. It can act like a steroid, and women who have taken it report feeling huge rushes of adrenaline and engaging in violent behavior. We don’t know if the shooter was on testosterone, but the way the medical community hands it out like candy to confused girls, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a lot harder to get it if you’re a man with low testosterone, by the way. Should a man need hormone therapy, I hear the process is a long one. He can’t just go to Planned Parenthood and say he feels like he needs to be more manly and get a same-day supply like confused girls can.
What are we doing? Why are we allowing this? And what needs to happen to make it stop?
Will anyone but me be talking about the mental health crisis in this country exacerbated by COVID in the coming weeks, or will we all still be arguing about guns? My money is on guns. And the reason is that no one wants to address the monster that has been created to feed Big Pharma. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson and the rest donate way too much money to the politicians on both sides to be investigated for their role in creating the sick and violent children of America.
No one will investigate social media giants that we know are contributing to the mental illnesses of children. No one will make them stop offering their legal drug to kids. Instead, we will keep going around in circles about guns. Because that’s easy. Everyone already has their pre-planned arguments for that one all worked out.
Related: Big Tech Should Pay Reparations for Harming Americans’ Mental Health and Causing Addictions
But nobody wants to face the ugly truth: parents are breaking up their families and not parenting their kids and instead letting the computers do it for them. Children are despondent because the people who are supposed to love them the most are ignoring them, so they seek refuge in social media, where despicable money-grubbing executives and predators are happy to take over for parents and push them down dark algorithmic rabbit holes that are making the kids mentally sick. Those CEOs then hide the data about what they are doing from everyone.
When parents seek therapists to help their sick kids, the therapists give them drugs that make the kids more violent or depressed. Then everyone pretends to be shocked when kids shoot kids.
Stop it. All of you.
I’m tired of pretending that any of this is about guns. It’s not about too many guns or not enough gun control. There were just as many gun owners in this country in 1960 as there are now, and kids weren’t shooting their classmates. But back then we had a majority of intact families. Divorce was rare. Moms were at home. Children were supervised, had communities full of neighbors who watched out for them, and there was no blasted social media. This is not a hard thing to figure out. We have replaced actual real-life relationships with online relationships with strangers, and everyone wants to know why everyone is so unhappy!
What we find hard to do is put the phones and computers down, even when we know what it is doing to our children. We are addicts. Who are the monsters again? Let today be the wake-up call you needed. Put down the devices. Spend time with your children, because you may not have another day to spend with them.