Third Report from the Committee for the Review of History, Issued on 13 March 2217

In this third report, issued four days later than our last conveyance on 8 March 2217, we relate to citizens in the Universal Confederacy our continuing fascination with the crude level of education, thought, and citizenship that prevailed in the United States Sub-Region of North America (what was in 2017 known as the United States of America) during the early 21^st century.   As in our previous communications, we base this report on our intense review of the historical record.

 

We offer as in our other reports descriptions and evidence of the stark reality, so that our academically sophisticated populace, accustomed as that citizenry is to examining evidence objectively and with careful attention to factual detail, may consider the facts along with a few comments contrasting the state of our own public consciousness in the year 2217 with the low level of citizen awareness prevailing two hundred years ago.

 

Therefore, be aware that in addition to our previously recorded information, these conditions, unimaginable to us in the year 2217, actually prevailed in the year 2017.

 

In this third report, we particularly emphasize the rampant drug addiction in what in the year 2017 was still called the United States of America, with these statistics having especially caught our attention:

 

>>>>>    Over 40,000,000 people smoked readily available tobacco-based items called cigarettes, for which photographs reveal people inhaling these ridiculous looking little cylinders protruding from their mouths;  the tar from these devices killed thousands of people each year.  

 

>>>>>    In the year 2017, over 25,000,000 people used a form of the cannabis plant known as marijuana or by names such as “pot” and “reefer”;  legalization of this substance in Colorado and Washington states was met with great joy by advocates who apparently had limited healthy recreational outlets and few aspects of life that brought them joy.       

 

>>>>>    People in the area coterminous with our United States Sub-Region of North America had special enthusiasm for alcoholic beverages in the year 2017;  fifty-six percent of adults in what was then the nation of the United States drank intoxicating alcoholic beverages;  more than 85,000 people died per year from alcohol-related deaths during this general time period, constituting the fourth leading cause of death;  approximately 10,000 alcohol-related deaths (31% of the total) occurred while driving the abundance of private vehicles maintained in the early 21^st century.

 

>>>>>    Another 1,500,000 people took a much more dangerous and addictive substance called cocaine, either by inhaling a white powder or smoking a form of the substance called “crack,” the latter of which was frequently sold on urban streets by people who apparently could find few other ways to make a living;  over 5,000 deaths related to cocaine use occurred in 2017.

 

>>>>>   Abuse of substances classified as methamphetamines was a particularly virulent problem in the year 2017;  these accounted for over 1,400,000 deaths per annum during the encompassing years, at a cost of over $20,000,000 to the national economy.  An astounding 60% of the male prison (institutions filled with impoverished and psychologically disturbed people) population had come to incarceration as methamphetamine addicts.

 

>>>>>  Abuse of a substance called heroin, one of many derivatives (classified “opioids”) of the opium plant was also astonishingly high in the year 2017, with estimates of users averaging about 700,000 people, with addicts estimated as high as 500,000;  over 8,000 people died annually from heroin abuse during the encompassing years.

 

 We cannot imagine that people in any part of our Universal Confederacy, including our  

United States Sub-Region of North America, would want to spend time injecting these debilitating and frequently lethal substances into their bodies.  But keep in view that these were the crude years before the Trump Tribulation of 2017-2025 and the partly intersecting Great Debate of 2020-2030. The succeeding years brought an ascending awareness of the degraded state of what was then commonly referred to as “American” society;  in a great elevation of individual and collective consciousness, there was a sociopolitical shift toward an appreciation of factual information and informed discussion.

 

Much of the injection of harmful and brain-boggling substances may be attributed to the low level of culture in the area coterminous with our United States Sub-Region of North America in the year 2017 and the general time span.  These were the years before the broad populace came to an appreciation of the works of Shakespeare, had little appreciation for the sculpture of the Ife, had limited understanding of the intricacies of music from the classical, baroque, and romantic eras, and remarkably---  given the quintessentially “American” blues-based musical forms---   even had constrained patience and aesthetic sensibility for listening to intricate jazz compositions with much understanding or appreciation.

 

We on the Committee for the Review of History at this juncture in 2217 return as always to our observation that most people in our United States Sub-Region of North America (United States of America, circa 2017) were poorly educated in the public schools of the time.  Only in the years after the Great Debate did citizens come to understand that knowledge, factual information, and academic discipline create in the genuinely well-educated person an ensuing full appreciation of nature, visual art, mathematics, science, drama, literature, and ethics that animate life and create happiness.  Accordingly, there were throughout the national entity of the United States of the time revolutionaries who set about the task of creating a knowledge-intensive system of public education.

 

Thus, dear citizens, be kind in your thoughts regarding those ill-educated people living in the year 2017, because as degraded as their lives were in 2017, we must be grateful for the discussions that these very ancestors of ours unleashed during the 2020-2050.  These unlikely progenitors of our own times emerged from the Trump Tribulation and the Great Debate with a burst of creative energy that produced the foundational values that make our lives in 2217 so joyful in each moment and happy throughout our earthly sojourn.