For a long time, America wasn’t the place to go to find inferior people. England sent even its worst criminals to the American colonies, and the colonists had enough intelligence and kindness to turn most of them into honest citizens.

Things changed in the 1960s with civil upheaval that set off a massive crime wave that spanned several generations and left us on the plateau of domestic unrest that we accept as normal today.

In the mid-60s, I sat in the “high achievement” class at my high school in Tacoma, Washington, as one of the school’s attentive and nice guys. A few rows away from me sat a smiling, handsome man who became one of America’s worst serial rapists and murderers. His name was Ted Bundy. How shocking his life was to me and those who knew him.

But 21st century America is something else entirely. We boast a fair number of notorious individuals hanging around in our boardrooms, statehouses, gyms, music and entertainment industries, and, sadly, even our educational and church institutions.

When I think of corporate America, I think of companies like Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family. The company fed opium to a medically illiterate America and killed people rather than nurse them back to health. Rogue giants like Enron and Wells Fargo have long underestimated the industries in which they operate. Newer companies like Google and TikTok have turned playful capitalism and socio-economic cooperation into real-life games of Monopoly and espionage for China.

Our political parties and governments at every level are regurgitating the names of bad actors like Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer, Robert Menendez, Eric Adams and George Santos on both sides of the aisle. A recent presidential kitchen cabinet gave us the names of such miscreants as Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani. Even our Supreme Court is ashamed of the membership of a Clarence Thomas.

The world of sports has given us bad actors, like the NFL player turned murderer Aaron Hernandez and the drafted professional football player turned serial killer Randall Woodfield. This sector of the economy also gave birth to the infamous doctor Larry Nassar, who abused gymnasts without limits for years. The world of entertainment and music has blessed us with Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Sean Diddy Combs, and many more.

In the field of education, admissions scandals involving our friendly aristocratic wealthy class involve personalities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin. Catholic, Protestant, and LDS church-based child abusers have operated unchecked with impunity for generations across the country, from Boston to Los Angeles and many points in between.

Even the names of many of our sacred and peaceful local communities have been tarnished by armed citizens who have turned sleepy towns like Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Columbine and Parkland into sites of mass death.

But, you say, evil people are always around, going back to Cain in the Bible. True enough. But the problem today is not the continuing reality of evil people, but the increasing extent of evil. And it looks set to get incalculably worse after November 5th.

Meanwhile, our news media remains incredibly inflated about the quality and quantity of patriotic efforts during such an unstable time. Their self-importance shines through in almost every news session they finish, as if they have truly saved the world with their information output. However, their historical knowledge base is incredibly limited, and their ability to accurately report events is further limited by the censorship imposed on them by their managers and owners.

Today, as we approach the elections, things are getting extremely risky in America. But corporate America continues to advertise business as usual, as if tomorrow were certain to be a bed of roses. Non-profit America continues to dance, sing, and celebrate our national culture as if nothing were wrong. America’s wealthy agenda-setting leaders are insulated from all the noise and mob. They don’t care what happens outside gated communities.

What is the American people’s plan to do about all this? High school-educated Americans and their college-educated cousins ​​can’t think of anything to do other than say, “Eat, drink, be happy, because we’ll die tomorrow.”

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Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is a citizen editor, historian of democracy, and Stanford University graduate.

This article first appeared in the Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: America Has Become the Inferior We