This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing that our nation’s young girls are in a state of absolute emotional and mental crisis. According to the CDC, 57% of high school girls said they were depressed in 2021, compared with 36% in 2011; 30% said they had considered suicide, compared with 19% in 2011. The numbers had also increased markedly for high school boys: 29% of high school boys reported depressive symptoms, up from 21% in 2011; 14% of high school boys had considered suicide, up from 13% a decade before.
Naturally, our nation’s pseudoscientific experts blame societal intolerance and lack of sexual sensitivity. Never mind the fact that more kids than ever are declaring themselves members of nonexistent identity groups (Demisexual! Gender nonbinary!), mistakenly self-diagnosing with Tourette’s syndrome or gender dysphoria, and claiming victimhood at the hands of a cruel society — a society that rewards and cheers all such claims. Never mind that we’ve now undergone a gender revolution in which we’ve declared biological sex itself passe, treated heterosexual norms as taboo and misogynistic and attempted to wipe away — along with actual sexual predation — much normal behavior in the name of #MeToo.
No, says the CDC, the problem — as always — is with society’s demands. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the CDC recommends “teaching kids about sexual consent, managing emotions, and asking for what they need”; furthermore, “Schools should encourage gender and sexuality alliances, provide safe spaces and people for LGBTQ+ students to go to for support, and ensure enforcement of antiharassment policies.”
Yes, the answer to five decades of social Leftism resulting in two generations unmoored from mental health is… more social Leftism!
Or, alternatively, any society that attempts to destroy all rules, roles and intermediate institutions laden with traditional values will end up abandoning its children — all in the name of tolerance and diversity. We have robbed young men of a sense of meaning: we’ve told them that they need not be providers, protectors or defenders, and that even aspiring to do so makes them bigoted remnants of the past. Instead, young men are told that they ought to relegate themselves to the role of “male feminists,” condemning their own “toxic masculinity” while shying away from the commitments that turn boys into men.
We have robbed young women of any sense of place, time or purpose: we’ve told them that they need not seek out a husband, aspire to bear and rear children or make preparations to build a home. Instead, we’ve told them that they can run from their own biology, declaring themselves boys rather than girls, delaying childbearing indefinitely, pursuing the things that are supposedly truly important: sexual license, more work hours, sipping wine at brunch with single friends.
We have done all of this because children do not lie at the top of our civilizational hierarchy: the interests of adults do. Increasingly, adults in the West see children as either a burden and thus avoid having them, or as validators of their own sense of subjective self-identity, requiring indoctrination into more liberal forms of social organization.
And now children are paying the price.
The social Left has been in control of virtually all levers of culture and policy for decades. Now they demand more control in order to alleviate the consequences of the chaos they have created. The answer, of course, is precisely the opposite: the reinvigoration of traditional sources of wisdom and values, the re-inculcation of morality and obligation. If our society does not quickly reverse field, the consequences for our young people will be utterly disastrous.
Ben Shapiro, 38, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is The Authoritarian Moment: How The Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
We are all being affected. There is too much garbage being peddled in our society and it it picked up and thrown at us in all directions by politicians, the entertainment industry, the Media, and the educational system. Pure garbage that undermines every fiber of the American way of life.
AND By the govt entities.. TIME TO END The CDC.
The three great institutions that secured in love the mental security of American women and men, and made America Great were the Church, the Nation and the Family, all now under weird woke attack. Strong men used to sacrifice themselves for institutions, today these institutions are sacrificed for the whims of individuals of woke putrefied political parties they use for control, by doing everything they can to destroy our winning established institutions, to create a new establishment of mayhem/division. Formerly strong raised American men who used to sacrifice their own individual lives, security and personal safety in order to defend their faith and family, country in martyrdom, who bore deep loyalties to their god and their nation, provided protecting security, for their women, and all entrusted to their care, reflecting the deep loyalty to their nation, and in war even sacrificed their very lives for family and fatherland, now turned into neuter-land by insane Democrat party leaders who know not the meaning of gender. When trials arose men and women came together like two fold chords in strength to overcome,,, now weakly divided in gender confusion, left alone to rely on neutered government men of sad empty sacks, with THE PEOPLE of all imagined genders and races, just now unprotected collateral damage on the road to their secular socialist hell.
I believe we’ve lost an entire generation, if not two, to the left through public schools, social media and weak parents.
WE didn’t “Lose” it, THE LEFT stole them via brainwashing.