I am not posting this to offend. I am osting this to raise the awareness of those, who blindly follow the belief that their home is "the greatest place on earth" or "God's own country". It is this misbelief which leads into arrogance and ignorance, making it easy to disrespect and disconsider other cultures and nations. For those of you who, on previous threads and in the future, name America as an example of how a civilization should work, eat this. And think twice.

Every year in America

- 27,000 Americans commit suicide.
- 50,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher.
- 26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.
- 23,000 are murdered.
- 85,000 are wounded by firearms.
- 38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
- 13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault rape, armed robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.
- 135,000 children take guns to school.
- 5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not including traffic violations).
- 125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.
- 473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses; 53,000 of these are nonsmokers.
- 6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis.
- 5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious debilitations.
- 1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found under the kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all
eighth-graders have "huffed" toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.
- 31,450,000 use marijuana; 3,000,000 of whom are heavy usuers.
- 37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The
users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous.
- 2,000,000 nonhospitalized persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."
- 5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
- 200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are injurious to the brain and nervous system.
- 600 to 1,000 are lobotomized, mostly women.
- 25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical
sources for mental and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.
- 6,800,000 turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and social counselors for
help with emotional troubles. In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling in their lifetimes.
- 1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at hospitals.
- 2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of whom die from the surgery.
- 180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more than are killed by airline and
automobile accidents combined.
- 14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.
- 45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is reduced.
- 1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents; but 150,000 of these auto injury victims
suffer permanent impairments.
- 126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional
deficiency, environmental toxicity, or maternal drug ddiction.
- 2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or abuse, including physical torture and
deliberate starvation.
- 5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.
- 30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.
- 1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse,
from parents and other adults. Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent come
from white families.
- 150,000 children are reported missing.
- 50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, "Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids."
- 900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours a day in violation of child labor laws.
- 2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to U.S. women.
- 700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.
- 5,000,000 workers are injured on the job; 150,000 of whom suffer permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis, impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.
- 100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases, including black lung, brown lung, cancer, and
tuberculosis.
- 14,000 are killed on the job; about 90 percent are men.
- 100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.
- 60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants or contaminants in food, water, or air.
- 4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.
- 20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7, the mutant bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to lifelong physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat inspection with new technologies could eliminate most instances of contamination--so would vegetarianism.

At present:
- 5,100,000 are behind bars or on probation or parole;
- 2,700,000 of these are either locked up in county, state or federal prisons or under legal supervision.
- Each week 1,600 more people go to jail than leave.
- The prison population has skyrocketed over 200 percent since 1980. Over 40 percent of inmates are jailed on nonviolent drug related crimes. African Americans constitute 13 percent of drug users but 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences. For nondrug offenses, African Americans get prison terms that average about 10 percent longer than Caucasians for
similar crimes.
- 15,000+ have tuberculosis, with the numbers growing rapidly; 10,000,000 or more carry the tuberculosis bacilli, with large numbers among the economically deprived or addicted.
- 10,000,000 people have serious drinking problems; alcoholism is on the rise.
- 16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983 as Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage.
- 160,000 will die from diabetes this year.
- 280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or mental retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of mind control drugs.
- 255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily released in recent years. Many of the "deinstitutionalized" are now in flophouses or wandering the streets.
- 3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A disproportionate number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities could have been corrected with early treatment or prevented with better living conditions.
- 2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome.
- 10,000,000+ suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase of 145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly polluted quality of the air.
- 40,000,000 or more are without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness.
- 1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other close relatives grows dramatically as economic conditions worsen.
- 1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large but undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth, and abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest possible profit.
- 1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages, reformatories, and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process. Most are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to beatings, sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind control drugs, and in some cases psychosurgery.
- 1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000 have died of that disease.
- 950,000 school children are treated with powerful mind control drugs for "hyperactivity" every year--with side effects like weight loss, growth retardation and acute psychosis.
- 4,000,000 children are growing up with unattended learning disabilities.
- 4,500,000+ children, or more than half of the 9,000,000 children on welfare, suffer from malnutrition. Many of these suffer brain damage caused by prenatal and infant malnourishment.
- 40,000,000 persons, or one of every four women and more than one of every ten men, are estimated to
have been sexually molested as children, most often between the ages of 9 and 12, usually by close relatives or family acquaintances. Such abuse almost always extends into their early teens and is a part of their continual memory and not a product of memory retrieval in therapy.
- 7,000,000 to 12,000,000 are unemployed; numbers vary with the business cycle. Increasing numbers of
the chronically unemployed show signs of stress and emotional depression.
- 6,000,000 are in "contingent" jobs, or jobs structured to last only temporarily. About 60 percent of these
would prefer permanent employment.
- 15,000,000 or more are part-time or reduced-time "contract" workers who need full-time jobs and who
work without benefits.
- 3,000,000 additional workers are unemployed but uncounted because their unemployment benefits have run out, or they never qualified for benefits, or they have given up looking for work, or they joined the armed forces because they were unable to find work.
- 80,000,000 live on incomes estimated by the U.S. Department of Labor as below a "comfortable adequacy"; 35,000,000 of these live below the poverty level.
- 12,000,000 of those at poverty's rock bottom suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition. The majority of the people living at or below the poverty level
- experience hunger during some portion of the year.
- 2,000,000 or more are homeless, forced to live on the streets or in makeshift shelters.
- 160,000,000+ are members of households that are in debt, a sharp increase from the 100 million of less than a decade ago. A majority indicate they have borrowed money not for luxuries but for necessities. Mounting debts threaten a financial crack-up in more and more families.

First of all NEVER post stats without giving a source. It's takes away all validiy. For all we know these numbers came out of your ass.

Second, let's see the stats on Germany.


(Inflammatory comment removed by lovemachine before the org police could get involved)
[This message was edited Thu Sep 12 7:38:20 PDT 2002 by lovemachine]

lovemachine said:

hmm... with insulting me, you just disqualify your own comment. anyway, look at www.zmag.org and have a peek for yourself. will help you maybe to brighten your horizon. stats on germany? gimme some time. however, I can tell you now that in germany less people are being murdered in the whole year than in Los Angeles in a one month. that we have a health and social system (considered to be the best in the world, I might add) which prevents us from developing numbers like those I have posted. however, no country is perfect, germany sure does have quite many issues to work out. if you'd like to, start a thread on it, give me some numbers and lets discuss. but dont call me assmuncher, whine like a baby and then leave it like that. its that type of behaviour that raises ant-americanizm (and I surely dont consider myself being affected by that).

Those numbers look huge, until you remember that we have 260,000,000 people here.

I'd be curious to see how - on a percentage basis - we stack up against other countries.

I will, however, wholeheartedly state that the last statistic in your list - 160,000,000 of us have household debt - is very serious.

"Debt" is a four-letter word, and if an old man like me can give any advice to our younger readers, it's this - throw away the credit cards. Pay cash for everything but your house and maybe your car.

You'll live a much freer and happier life if you're not tied down by debt.

Another piece of advice from this old man: There are mainly two things that break up a marriage - sex and money. Stay out of debt, and all you've got to worry about is sex.

Only having to worry about sex - doesn't that sound cool?

Well that does make you think, that the world is pretty much fucked up. Is ANYONE happy? I mean we have more than our parents, or previous generations ever did, opportunities, material things, ('better lifestyles'?) but we still aren't satisfied. There is too much greed today and greed leads to destruction. People 30/40 years ago were healthier, did put up with more shit without letting it get to them, and had less, but were content. I know you have used America as the prime example, but this does happen everyday everywhere. So how many 'normal, content, unaffected' people are left? Just us fellow orgers I expect.

Just enjoy life as best you can, and what ever shit life throws at you, sit back and deal with it, it will make you a stronger person in the end. It is better that, than being a statistic as mentioned above. This is my opinion ONLY. I know everyone is different, but I myself have had a pretty 'colourful' life, and not all good, but I am still here and feel GREAT!!!

Will add more later...
[This message was edited Thu Sep 12 10:16:06 PDT 2002 by REDFEATHERS]

RodeoSchro said:

I agree, the US have a high population. I didnt wanna make the effort to break down those numbers in percent... it would look different. however, they are still enormous. unfortunately I do not have ALL those numbers from other countries to compare. however, I am being told, that america in the democratic countries has the highest of them all.

soulpower said:

Nah, whatever.

All I have to do is look out my window and I realize that I have an EXTREMELY high quality of life regaurdless of what some misleading statistics may say.

lovemachine said:

I believe that, I am happy for you. Which doesnt mean that everybody else in your country feels the same way. If President Mugabe looks out his window he will feel happy too. However, Zimbabwe doesnt... Its that kind of attitude, the idea that the world is about your personal satisfaction, which makes people lose touch with the reality around them. maybe you shouldnt only look out YOUR window. maybe you should walk the streets outside your neighbourhood with open eyes.

I wish people would start posting all the good that people do as well. Everything you see on the news and in the papers is just negative shit. We all have our problems. Let's stop shitting on America and do something positive.

soulpower said:

Wow lovemachine is the American equivalent of Pres. Mugabe! I didn't know you had it like that!

soulpower said:

You presume to know me (but you do not).

Of course America has problems, but these problems do not mean that America is not the "greatest place on Earth".

CarrieLee said:

thats like saying "blindfold me so I dont have to see the evils of the world". why should we filter? why should I start a thread on the beautiful things of this country? we all know about the beauty of it. what many people dont know is the bad things. and you wanna run away from them? do you think thats gonna change your reality?

CarrieLee said:

Hi CarrieLee! I agree, but nobody ever talks about the positive! Look at the news, the television etc, or the Org threads. People usually start praying when something bad is going to or has happened, not often enogh to thank God for the good things...

Let's just have a party, get pissed and thank God for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll! :p:

Universaluv said:

Yeah I would have thought President Mugabe was more then just a middle-class schlub.



.
[This message was edited Thu Sep 12 7:40:19 PDT 2002 by lovemachine]

lovemachine said:

I dont find anything in my last post to you that shows me that I am pretending to know you. so chill, bro. I just analyzed what you said, and that sounded like "I'm cool, so all is cool". thats pretty selfish and narrowminded, dont you think?

so you DO believe that america is the greatest place on earth, in spite of all the facts? how many other places have you been to in order to make such a statement? I have traveled to -- I guess -- about 40 different countries. However, I would not be brave enough to make such a judgement.

soulpower said:

Betcha couldn't say that back in the 1940s, eh? Or has all of that nonsense been forgotten?

Universaluv said:

lol... if you see it like that... no, I was just tryin to show an example of somebody prominent with a blurred vision. I could have named one of my friends in the US, but since none of you actually know em...

You know at first this topic bothered me because I looked at it as American bashing and I'm so tired of that.

But now I realize that soulpower just started this thread to get under people's skin a little bit so I'm not so bothered any more. I don't actually believe that he thinks America is so bad.

He may be partially right with his stated viewpoint, but I feel his stats are misleading to say the least.

I am out of this thread.

soulpower said:

The "evils of the world"? Who are you, William Bennett?

You think the US is evil? An evil empire maybe?

If you see mental illness and drug problems and such in terms of good and evil, I can't help you. Maybe you should try to understand the root cause of this evil rather than just broadly labeling an entire country...

MrTation said:

well, those stats up there are from today, not the 1940s or any other era. thats why the murdering of the slaves and native americans are not included either. lets stay with the facts from today. besides, just in case you dont know, nazi-germany and the germany of today have nothing in common but the name. we dont even have death penalty...

soulpower said:

I'm not running away from shit. We know what's going on here, and a lot of people are doing things to change it. Including myself. But you just don't hear about it because people are so quick to jump on the bad and not the good. I'm not attacking you.

Why not create a list with the problems of the world and not just America?

2the9s said:

with saying "evils (maybe not a good definition, I grant you that) " I was meaning the "bad things", not only in america but in the entire world. you were the one concluding I was only talking about the US when I said "world", so thats your problem, sorry.

facts...

Is easy throwing around numbers.

You cannot compare, fumble around with the word 'sad' and think you can get a conversation going without expecting Americans to feel (attacted, hurt, whatever) by this post.

soulpower said:

Nothing in your post states problems in the "world". It was meant to knock down America.

Hey, before anyone brings it up, yeah, the Internet is global but this asshole knows that most of us are American. He's a troll, and I suggest we ignore it.

Or add up all those numbers and see how that stacks up to the death count of innocent Jews and others by the hands of German Nazis in WWII. This kind of arguing is nonsense.

CarrieLee said:

lovemachine said:

you are right. I love the good things about america, I have lived and wokrd there for many years, and some of my best friends are americans. why do so many of you think that anybody who critisizes your country is an "america-hater"? now thats splitting the world in only good and evil.

soulpower said:

Ok so if an American were to post a list of sad facts about Germany you wouldn't jump on us? Maybe you should have elaborated a little bit. How are we not going to take offense to this? Think a little first, please.



[This message was edited Thu Sep 12 7:54:08 PDT 2002 by CarrieLee]

tommyalma said:

who are you to say that this argument is nonsense? I cant believe how ignorant you are bringing up the "nazi-issue". Its so tired, it was, as I said before, a whole other country. I was bringing up numbers from TODAY. obviously you cannot make that difference. if yoiu noticed, I wasnt throwing around topics such as the slave-killings or massacres of native americans. that would even outdo the jewish toll. I easily could have, but I wanted to keep the topic as a current one. too bad you are not capable of doing that.

soulpower said:

The "bad things"? That's not much better. Being close to someone who has a rather serious mental illness, I find your simplistic view to be scary.

It's been difficult enough fighting the stigma that goes along with such conditions without having to counter fundamentalist views like yours.