George H. W. Bush and deaths of despair

George H. W. Bush RIP
I voted for a Bush 7 times – 9 if you count VP votes.  JEB!! had long left the race by the time the 2016 Republican primary rolled around to IN, so I can say I never cast a vote for a Bush opponent. 

H.W. Bush was a man of his times. Like my dad, he’d been to war, raised a family and run a business by an age that I was still bouncing around wondering what to do in life.

There was no fanfare in any of it.  It was life.  It was life without participation trophies, safe spaces, crying rooms or therapy dolls.  His was a generation that just got on with business.

GHWB is gone.  An amazing life well lived in the manner of his generation – grace and understated greatness.

Final word on GHWB
GHWB’s death proves one thing – for the Dopes the only good Republican is a dead Republican.  They could not stand GHWB while he was in office.  They lied about him and lampooned him mercilessly.

Now he’s gone and compared to the current occupant of the White House, GHWB is now a great man.  He always was.        

Today’s JG rant
In the editorial just under the JG editors feign concern about “Deaths of despair” as they tackle the nation’s declining life expectancy. Lex could not resist tilting at that windmill.

Re: JG editorial “’Deaths of despair’ shorten nation’s life expectancy rate”

Many studies show that people of faith live happier fuller lives.  Is it possible that there’s a correlation between America’s rise in “deaths of despair” that shorten the nation’s overall life expectancy and the decline of America’s religious underpinnings? 

The far left, the MSM and America’s Hollywood elite (actually all one in the same) have conducted a 60 year unending assault on all things religious.  They have removed God from schools and from the Public Square. Of late they are using unelected judges to stifle religious expression, coerce businesses and religious orders like the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate of their deeply held religious beliefs while using public funding for the assault.

It’s odd that many of the same people destroying and lampooning the religious institutions that are proven to have given so many people hope through the millennium are now lamenting “deaths of despair.”

If all that’s too non-secular, consider the left’s attack on every reliable secular institution of American life from the nation’s founding to marriage, from law enforcement to the education system, from the courts to the constitution nothing is sacred. 

It used to be that Americans were taught that, for all its faults, America was the exception in the world.  We knew that we were freer, that we had more opportunity, that we were able to pursue life, liberty and happiness like nowhere else in the world or in the history of the world.

For 60 years the Left has assaulted those notions.  Despite its history of being a flawed but self-correcting republic, Lefties insist that America has never been anything more than racist, misogynist, homophobic, fascist sh*thole founded by despicable white supremacists for the purpose of suppressing women and people of color and used to rape the world of its resources for the benefit of a few – never having done one damn thing for the benefit of anyone else.

So is it any wonder that there’s despair?  Young Americans who were once told that they lived in the greatest country in the history of the world that, faults and all, offered them the opportunity to rise as high as their God given talents, savvy and drive would take them are now told that they live in a country with a racist treasonous president elected by a racist population selfishly destroying the planet.

It’s amazing to me that the intelligentsia in America is confounded by a rise in “deaths of despair.”  It’s the very despair that they foment through a relentless assault on nearly everything that might offer Americans hope.

'Deaths of despair' shorten nation's life expectancy rate

When U.S. life expectancy last went into the kind of extended decline reflected in statistics released this week, the nation was part of a world war and a pandemic. In 1918, as World War I was ending, life expectancy was 39 years and a third of the nation's deaths were attributed to influenza or pneumonia.

Life expectancy in America increased over the decades; it was the highest in the world during the 1960s. But a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control this week confirms that the decline of the past few years is continuing, and that big increases in drug overdoses and suicides are partly to blame.

That such “deaths of despair” threaten to undermine a century of advancement on so many medical fronts may be hard to comprehend. Disease and accidents are hardly vanquished – the flu still kills thousands every year. But the sad reality is that more and more Americans are succumbing to causes that stem from mental health issues, their lifestyle choices and their outlook on life. Some health experts would count tobacco deaths in that category, too, along with at least part of the rising death toll from alcohol and diabetes.

In a statement Wednesday, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield called the newest data “a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.”

Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Commissioner Dr. Deborah McMahan sounds the alarm about deaths of despair too. She has stressed that some of this self-inflicted damage is hitting our state and our community particularly hard, as when she noted in July that suicides in the county had risen 50 percent over the previous three years.

“This is not a good trajectory,” McMahan observed.