Your fortunate to have had a mother with the sense to refuse to have her child dosed with pharmaceuticals. Kids are being treated like guinea pigs by these drug companies. At least one niece and one nephew, still in grade school, have been on antidepressants at various times and starting at a young age.
By the way, they eat a horriible diet, rarely play outside, etc. They basically eat starchy carbs and candy all day whle sitting around the house and playing on their smartphones. I wonder why they’re depressed. sigh My brother, as with most Americans, doesn’t seem to comprehend why diet and nutrition matters.
But I must admit that my nephew has been hit the hardest by this. His mother definitely did more to help his sister than him. There is an element of truth to the “boy crisis,” as boys like him do get left behind. Even as I’d frame it as part of a larger crisis that includes girls, there is something unique going on among boys and we need to talk about it.
And I’m likewise not dismissive of the mens’ rights movement. I do think they make some good points. The fact of the matter is there are plenty of problems to go around. Consider the fact that most abuse of boys in particular is committed by women, not men, even if that is merely a side effect of women spending more time around children. Worse still, agencies to protect children from abuse have a record of more likely dismissing claims of abuse made by boys.
That said, feminism also expresses some genuine truths that need to be acknowledged. But ever there, we need to broaden the discussion to voices less often heard. Feminism, like so much of mainstream identity politics, has been dominated by middle class whites. All gender politics take on greater significance when interpreted through an intersectional lens.
By the way, I’ve come to the view that maybe the single greatest factor of conflict and crisis might be inequality. Keith Payne, as with Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, has shown that everyone, even the rich, are worse off in high inequality societies (as compared to equivalent societes that are low inequality; e.g., comparing US to Nordic countries). As an additional point, Payne points out high inequalty mimics the stress of poverty and scarcity.
The Broken Ladder
by Keith Payne
pp. 110-111
“Political scientist Nolan McCarty and his colleagues have also traced political divisions over the last century in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, formulating a measure of polarization based on how lawmakers vote, similar to the data used for Andris’s graphs. The polarization index is at its highest when all Democrats vote one way and all Republicans vote the other. Using this index, they calculated how polarized American politics has been in every Congress since 1947. Figure 4.5 shows that polarization in the House of Representatives and the Gini index of inequality have followed strikingly similar trajectories. Results for the Senate are similar. Both inequality and polarization were relatively low through the 1950s and 1960s. They then began rising in tandem in the mid-1970s and have remained on par ever since.”
pp. 2-4
“As they discovered, the odds of an air rage incident were almost four times higher in the coach section of a plane with a first-class cabin than in a plane that did not have one. Other factors mattered, too, like flight delays. But the presence of a first-class section raised the chances of a disturbance by the same amount as a nine-and-a-half-hour delay.
“To test the idea another way, the researchers looked at how the boarding process highlights status differences. Most planes with a first-class cabin board at the front, which forces the coach passengers to trudge down the aisle, dragging their baggage past the well-heeled and the already comfortably seated. But about 15 percent of flights board in the middle or at the back of the plane, which spares the coach passengers this gauntlet. As predicted, air rage was about twice as likely on flights that boarded at the front, raising the chances of an incident by the same amount as waiting out a six-hour delay.
“This air rage study is revealing, but not just because it illustrates how inequality drives wedges between the haves and the have-nots. What makes it fascinating to me is that incidents of rage take place even when there are no true have-nots on a flight. Since an average economy-class ticket costs several hundred dollars, few genuinely poor people can afford to travel on a modern commercial airplane. Yet even relative differences among the respectable middle-class people flying coach can create conflict and chaos. In fact, the chaos is not limited to coach: First-class flyers in the study were several times more likely to erupt in air rage when they were brought up close and personal with the rabble on front-loading planes. As Ivana Trump’s behavior can attest, when the level of inequality becomes too large to ignore, everyone starts acting strange.
“But they do not act strange in just any old way. Inequality affects our actions and our feelings in the same systematic, predictable fashion again and again. It makes us shortsighted and prone to risky behavior, willing to sacrifice a secure future for immediate gratification. It makes us more inclined to make self-defeating decisions. It makes us believe weird things, superstitiously clinging to the world as we want it to be rather than as it is. Inequality divides us, cleaving us into camps not only of income but also of ideology and race, eroding our trust in one another. It generates stress and makes us all less healthy and less happy.
“Picture a neighborhood full of people like the ones I’ve described above: shortsighted, irresponsible people making bad choices; mistrustful people segregated by race and by ideology; superstitious people who won’t listen to reason; people who turn to self-destructive habits as they cope with the stress and anxieties of their daily lives. These are the classic tropes of poverty and could serve as a stereotypical description of the population of any poor inner-city neighborhood or depressed rural trailer park. But as we will see in the chapters ahead, inequality can produce these tendencies even among the middle class and wealthy individuals.
“What is also notable about the air rage study is that it illustrates that inequality is not the same as poverty, although it can feel an awful lot like it. That phenomenon is the subject of this book. Inequality makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not. Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds that the United States of America, the richest and most unequal of countries, has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a superpower.”