From our absurd addictions to pills and surgery to the frightening number of neighbourhood
sex offenders, we count 25 disturbing facts about our society!
25 According to the Centres for Disease Control
and Prevention, doctors in the United States write more than 250 million prescriptions
for antidepressants each year.
Also, right now, seventy million Americans are reported to be on some kind of prescribed
mind-altering drug.
That’s an alarming statistic.
We should throw some drugs at it.
24 Mike and Carol Brady got it wrong wrong: society
is morally bankrupt.
The fifty worst charities in America give less than four percent of their raised donations
to their intended causes.
Over a decade, one major diabetes charity raised almost $14 million but gave less than
$10,000 to patients.
Six of the fifty worst pocketed all their donations.
You can help victims of scam charities by sending money to the Danger Dolan Against
Fake Charities Foundation.
Blank cheques accepted!
23 Of the American population aged twelve or
older, eleven percent has admitted to driving home under the influence of alcohol at least
once during the past year.
Maybe that’s where the expression ‘You drive worse than a drunk twelve-year-old!’
comes from.
22 According to the FBI, there are now more than
1.4 million gang members involved in the US’s 33,000 active criminal gangs.
Many of these are disenfranchised young people.
If only they had their own Mr Miyagi.
21 Here’s a fun fact: nowadays, prescription
painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined.
If you can, stay away from drugs in general.
Stick to a safe hobby, like shooting.
20 No one’s perfect, but many Americans sure
want to be – at least in the looks department.
This is why they get more plastic surgery done than the citizens of any other country
in the world.
19 Teen pregnancy is still a huge problem in
the first world.
America has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world, with fifty-seven out
of every one thousand girls aged between fifteen and nineteen having a child.
New Zealand, England and Wales’ statistics aren’t far off, while Switzerland, being
the sensible nation that it is, has the lowest teen pregnancy rate: just eight cases per
one thousand teen girls.
Another disturbing fact is that eighteen percent of all American abortions are performed on
teenagers.
Grab the rubbers and carrots.
It’s time to give Mary-Sue the talk …
18 With 868 out of every 1,000 people incarcerated,
Seychelles in East Africa has the highest number of prisoners per capita – at least
this year.
Number two is – you guessed – the US, which currently has twenty-two percent of
the entire world’s prisoners.
According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, this is more than 2.2 million
people.
17 A 2014 Commonwealth Fund survey found that
average Americans spend $8,505 a year on medical care – far more than the twelve other surveyed
industrialised countries – but the United States ranked dead last in overall healthcare
performance, in metrics such as fairness of care, efficiency and healthy lifestyles.
It seems the US’s healthcare system needs to be jolted with a defibrillator.
16 How’s this for a sad indictment of society?
Eighty percent of female sex abuse victims are abused by someone known to the child or
the child’s family.
So much for family and community … It’s also estimated that one out of every
four girls will be sexually abused before they become adults.
15 America has the highest STD infection rate
in the industrialised world, with twenty million new cases every year.
American citizens aged between fifteen and twenty-four account for about fifty percent
of all new STD cases.
It costs the nation almost sixteen billion dollars a year to treat these sexually transmitted
diseases.
14 This might disturb the religiously minded:
nearly one-fifth of all adults in the US have no religious affiliation.
According to the Census Bureau, this number more than doubled between 1990 and 2008.
Eighty-eight percent of these heathens aren’t looking for religion and, if interest in Christianity
continues to fall at its current rate, the percentage of Americans attending church in
2050 will be half of what it is today.
13 A study found that a staggering eighty-six
percent of abortions are done for the sake of convenience.
Planned Parenthood also receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government
each year and reportedly performs over 300,000 abortions a year.
Some of their clinics sell aborted baby parts to medical researchers.
12 America has the highest divorce rate in the
world by a good margin.
This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone interested in celebrity culture as
most of them treat marriage like a game of musical chairs.
11 There are over half a million homeless people
in our society – and a quarter of these are children.
Economic hardship is usually the reason, although domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness
in women.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has had its budget slashed in recent decades,
meaning the amount of low-income homes has decrease by 10,000 each year.
Because of this, many of our homeless live in cars, parks and bus or train stations.
10 Pornography has become an extremely prevalent
part of modern culture, with thirty percent of all internet traffic now going to adult
sites.
Seventy percent of young men aged eighteen to twenty-four visit at least one naughty
site each month, and the average high school boy spends two hours typing with one hand
every week.
Officials also estimate that 600,000 Americans trade pornographic images of children online
and a survey revealed that twenty-five percent of all American employees with internet access
visit porn sites during work hours.
9 Every year, at least 8,000 US soldiers and
veterans commit suicide – over twenty-two a day.
More than a quarter of these deaths are attributed to side effects from prescription and psychotropic
drugs, so, technically, medications are killing more American soldiers than Al-Qaeda.
8 In addition to America’s over-reliance on
antidepressants, nearly seventy percent of American citizens regularly take at least
one prescription drug.
And twenty percent of these are on at least five prescription drugs.
Americans spend more than 280 billion dollars on prescription drugs each year.
7 In 2014, 1,149 people were killed by police
officers.
Unsurprisingly, a study found that the most common form of police misconduct is excessive
force.
6 According to the National Centre for Missing
& Exploited Children, there are almost 750,000 registered sex offenders in the United States.
106,216 of these are in the state of California alone.
Stick your head out the window and give them a wave now.
5 According to the Energy Information Administration,
the United States annually consumes at least eighteen percent of the total worldwide energy
consumption.
While this mightn’t sound like much, keep in mind that there are only 320 million people
in the country — just four and a half percent of the world’s total population.
4 The advent of smartphones has made our brains
busier than ever before.
We’re constantly assaulted with information and this technology addiction and forced multitasking
is taking its toll, making us less efficient.
It’s estimated there’ll be 2.56 billion smartphone users in the world by 2018.
That’s a lot of distracted idiots crossing the street.
3 EPA figures indicate that Americans throw
out about 4.5 pounds – or two kilograms – of trash every day.
Accounting for the country’s entire population, this means 1.4 billion pounds (635 million
kilograms) of trash is tossed out daily.
This makes America among the most wasteful countries on Earth, with Nevada being the
most wasteful state for five years running.
However, the US still generates less municipal solid waste than the Caribbean, which lacks
waste management options, proper infrastructure and has a fuck-tonne of wasteful tourists
using their golden sands for a toilet.
2 Average SAT scores in America have been falling
for years.
Currently, fifteen-year-olds who attend American public schools rank below the top half of
all industrialised nations in math or science literacy.
We need to fix this frightening downward trajectory before we all end up in the Centre for Kids
Who Can’t Read Good.
At least we’ll learn how to do other stuff good, too.
1 A 2014 study reconfirmed that the US is still
the most overweight country on the planet.
Worldwide, 38 percent of men and 36.9 percent of women are considered overweight or obese;
however, in the US, 70.9 percent of men and 61.9 percent of women make their bathroom
scales quake with fear.
Mexico takes second place in the obesity stakes – at least in the industrialised world.
One contributing factor to the US’s weight problem is that the average citizen drinks
more than six hundred cans of sodas a year.
What’s even grosser is that some of those were probably Dr Peppers.
Ew.