Or as Professor Cheryl I. Harris might put it, they discovered that their Whiteness makes them property!
Posted on 10/21/2008 6:10:19 AM PDT by Malone LaVeigh
The rate of suicide in the United States has risen for the first time in a decade and middle-age white men and women are driving the increase, according to a study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Without doubt! Probably there will be some Spree killings along with it.
Nah, suicide is childish and is more likely if the messiah isn’t elected.
Well, we were promised change.
What? Baby Boomers buying their first motercycle isn’t enough? Now they have to go out and kill themselves directly?
And if they don’t finish the job, we’ll put a government program in place to do it for them!
Da*n. We get blamed for everything! Not fair!
I think it’s the Boomers hitting the age where they wonder what it was all about. Seriously, I think you’ll find a lot of the irreligious, oft-divorced or never married, aging and no longer able to be sexually active, multiple-abortion and insanely materialistic liberals sinking into profound depression as they get older. But that’s ok, under Obama we’ll have euthanasia all in place and ready to help them over those hard patches...
Overtaxed, overworked, and oversold brain-killing drugs by the pharma cartels.
Cut the baby-boomer insults. Maybe they’re carrying a greater load—kids moving back home, caring for aging parents, retirement plans disappearing, jobs disappearing, losing homes, etc. They have reasons to be depressed.
We are a LARGE group. They are not saying which end of the era they are speaking of, are they?
PS We didn’t ALL do drugs.
It’s a very odd thing psychologically to commit suicide when you aren’t really young, really old. or really sick.
I watched the first 20 minutes of the first episode of a hit TV show (Desperate Housewives) a few years back and was stunned. I haven’t watched it again because I found it so disturbing. The narrator of the show is having just a normal day and then she kills herself on a whim.
A very odd occurance and one that may portent a deep psychosis that dwells within our cultural subconscious. I personally think that we have sold each other such high expectations of what our lives should be, that there are many who reach middle-age, realize they don’t have the time or path to reach those expectations and become despondant.
This spike is troubling and I will want to see more analysis of the data.
I am 57 and it feels like payback.You know what is said about payback.
Start by identifying a more useful age range than "40-64."
It's fiction.
... and one that may portent a deep psychosis that dwells within our cultural subconscious.
Or at least the subconscious of people who write and produce TV smut.
“we didn’t all do drugs.”
At this point I’m more scared of the LEGAL drugs that are supposedly a cure-all for society—paxil, zoloft, ambien, lexi-pro, etc.
Not knocking people who take them and find benefit, but they are given out like candy—and like the other drugs—you can often tell when people are using...
I know it’s fiction, but it is, as you say later, a reflection of the people who wrote and produced it.
Since they are likely in the same age range as those who are actually committing suicide, does that not strike you as more than coincidence?
Sometimes cultural shifts can be seen in the art developed by a culture years before it becomes evident in the lives of the people in the culture. Look at the poetry, art and music of the 50s and see how the 60s turned out.
I was going to say-pencil me in, tentatively, in two weeks... ; )
I see your point, although I don’t know the age of the writers of “Desperate Housewives.”
We also can’t tell much about the actual numbers of suicides. A rate of increase gives us no information about magnitude: from 1 to 2 is a 100% increase.
Just using a common-sense filter, my prediction would be that the majority of the increase is in divorced or widowed individuals between 60-64, perhaps with severe health issues. This is the same group most likely to commit suicide when they’re in their 70’s or 80’s.
As Mr. Hawk pointed out, the increased use of psychotropic drugs is another likely factor.
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
In a nation that is quickly leaving God, what else can one expect?
I know a man whose wife left him for another man. She took their only child with her, and subjected that child to some low-level abuse. That little girl was his heart, and he was agonized to know that the courts would let him do nothing to help her. He was beggared by his ex and the judge, to the extent that he went from being quite prosperous and well-known in his field to living in a room with a mattress, a chair, and a table (the sheriff’s deputies came in and took everything else). His credit was ruined, which made it very hard for him to get another job. Worse, he sold his car to pay the child support, and started riding a bike—and within a few minutes had fallen off the bike, tore up his shoulder painfully, and didn’t have enough money to get his injury surgically repaired (as he was paying for his daughter’s private medical insurance and could afford none for himself).
He was a religious person, but he felt that God had abandoned him and had given the victory to the evil. He thought quite seriously about suicide. Only the knowledge that his daughter needed him to protect her from her mother kept him alive, despite his humiliation, pain, poverty, and losses. I imagine many other people who also are not shallow or materialistic consider suicide after horrendous heartache, chronic pain, injustice, etc., but they don’t have someone to keep them going, and they go ahead with it.
Some compassion is necessary, folks.
I imagine a lot of it, in males of that age group, could be called “A loss of confidence of purpose”, and in females, “A loss of social support”.
I distinguish between the two generalizations, both because they are recognized societal expectations, and because both have known biological consequences.
To explain, normal males have a biological prerogative to propagate their DNA; females to both get the best male DNA for their offspring and to get a male provider to help them raise their offspring. This is the underlying biological purpose of marriage, that gives a better outcome to males, females and their offspring than just basic reproduction.
To accomplish this, males have to focus on successful provision, both in competition with other males, and in cooperation with them in an organization or system. This means that males become emotionally dependent on this system, and suffer accordingly if it breaks down. “I’ve been fired, so I’ll kill myself”, is the attitude.
Females, however, are equally dependent on the female social structure, a decentralized support network back at “the base camp”, and on the males who “are out hunting.” If she loses support of this network, and/or her husband-provider, she and her offspring can be in deep trouble. “I or we have lost support, so I’ll kill myself, and maybe the kids, too.”
Variations on this happen even after child rearing is no longer an issue, especially now, when the original paradigm was so bitterly attacked during their childhood. In other words, both the male and female paradigm were strongly attacked in the 1960s.
Sex was for pleasure, and only incidentally for procreation. Females would provide just as well as males, so much that they really didn’t need males. Females no longer needed to network and provide each other mutual support. Marriage could be dispensed with, because it was merely a religious convention, and had no real purpose. Males were purely in competition with each other and didn’t need a cooperative system of employment or loyalty to each other.
In other words, trying to dispense with millions of years of biology, because it was assumed that it was just cultural baggage.
So it is no wonder that children raised in such chaos now find themselves, as adults, without individual or social purpose, alone in a crowd of equally detached people, bereft of sexual relationship as well.
Add to this the obvious and well known dilemmas, such as the emptiness of materialism, the decrepit spiritualism of many religions, and the nagging discomfort of imbalance and disorder of society.
I’m surprised that the suicide rate among such people is as low as it is.
I think the dissonance formed between being part of a demographic which is positive (productive, not criminal, innovative, etc.) and yet being the one acceptable target for humor because of what you are may be a significant driver of this phenomenon. This may not amount to a fully developed theory - but perhaps some epidemiologist could get on it.
Happens that I was a techno-geek at the time. Guys like me had no inclination to associate with those long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking FM types out protesting the War.
We were following the space program.
Or as Professor Cheryl I. Harris might put it, they discovered that their Whiteness makes them property!
Reading your story: there *is* a time to go postal. He was there and I certainly would have understood if he had taken matters into his own hands.
Hard working whites from about their 40s onward are continualy bombarded with the message from the media that they have become irrelevant. Ageism seems to be perfectly acceptable these days, especially among young people. These suicide statistics are not surprising.
Sometimes, Louis, dead is bettah.
Yeah, but I haven’t been with a woman since Sputnik.
Sounds racist to me...
“Start by identifying a more useful age range than “40-64.”
Great point, they have generation X, boomers, and silent generation in this study covering a 24 year difference in lives, there is a big difference between a 40 year old’s life and a 64 year old.
I hope they are all Democrats.
That's us...the stomped on generation.
“Seriously, I think you’ll find a lot of the irreligious, oft-divorced or never married, aging and no longer able to be sexually active, multiple-abortion and insanely materialistic liberals sinking into profound depression as they get older.”
Nihilism is just another word for nothing to live for.
Then why don’t “hard working whites from about their 40’s onward” just turn the garbage media off? I’m never upset by the content of TV commercials, TV sitcoms/dramas, or TV news, because I don’t watch them. Why just sit in front of the idiot box fuming until you kill yourself?
I don’t watch TV and can’t stand Hollywood movies, and I’m fine.
Then you must know about the “media messages” from what you read on Free Republic, like me?
If people are sitting around watching stuff that leads them to feel negatively about themselves, then they had problems before the stupid TV show came on.
Business failures, divorce, and plunge in a stock market portfolio will do this to you.
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