1. Obesity.
My own observations recently were chronicled in this post. I believe the condition is actually contagious. When so many people are obese in your daily comings and goings, it's that much easier to accept a bit of overweight in yourself. Over time, this leads to ever more cases. It's a terrible spiral going down with no indication of letting up any time soon.
The real problem, I suppose, is the fast food industry, and the hormones and additives they put in processed food. More recently there's the controversy of genetically modified foods. The portions in restaurants and diners are incredible large. The waste is awful.
Everything is geared towards more and more obesity.
2. Prescription drugs.
The drug addiction among young adults and teenagers seems to be worse than ever. Several documentaries I watched explained how the new synthetic heroin-like painkillers are so prevalent that entire new demographic groups are being affected. When the prescriptions run out, buying the pills on the street is extremely expensive. Many turn to heroin which a 10 times cheaper.
We already knew about the when assigning The Crown to Florida, partly because it is the hub of this deadly business, but on my recent visit I saw the devastation with my own eyes.
3. Gun availability.
The dreaded phone call from school that there's been a shooting is about 100 times more likely in the US than it is in Italy, for example. Easy access to guns makes life there a little bit more risky than it should be.
In one thing I agree with the gun-rights folks. It's the violence of the people that's the real problem. When walking down the street in the US towards a group of young men, the potential for violence is there. This has nothing to do with guns. But, to use that as an excuse for making guns easily available is insanity. Guns make whatever violence is already there that much worse. What could be more obvious than that.
One of the funny things about the gun control argument is that most of the vocal gun-rights guys are jingoistic rah-rah Americans, yet they embody these problems, in some cases all three.
