is doing to this country, blah, blah, blah.
Sadly, this is the MAIN issue for a whole swath of Trump supporters, and it is probably right to say that the underlying fear of these horrible, awful, terrible illegal immigrants 'storming the border' and 'invading us' is that most of them have brown skin.
But to conflate illegal immigration over the southern border with an opioid epidemic is Wisconsin is pretty off-base. About 40% of opioid abuse in the US is from taking prescription painkillers for recreational use. Forty percent. And those don't come over the southern border. They come from the pharmacy. Or your parents' medicine chest.
And here's something else to think about. The US makes up 5 percent of the world’s population and consumes approximately 80 percent of the world’s prescription opioid drugs.
What could be contributing to this?
Meaningless jobs.
Low pay jobs.
Crappy healthcare.
Stratospheric costs of college.
High student loan debt.
Politicians that say what we want to hear then don't do anything.
Feelings of powerlessness over policies that affect our lives.
Worry about losing job.
Worry about finances and not having enough to make ends meet.
Worry about healthcare.
Vague worries about global warming disaster.
Vague worries about the national debt.
In a word - our capitalistic system's emphasis on the primacy of the shareholder. To my mind, this systemic and forced greed breeds sociopaths, creates few winners and lots of losers, fouls the environment, busts unions, drives wages down, gives us crummy, diluted, downsized products at the store and so on.
Greed is an illusion. We have a few very freakish billionaires who feverishly amass wealth as if they will live forever, but they won't.
We are mortal. Let's organize ourselves around human need, not Wall Street greed.
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