“Neither my uncle nor my father would recognize the version of America that we have today,” independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. said in his State of the Union response.
He firmly declared, “Enough is enough,” to the government’s lack of interest in addressing these 21 disturbing realities:
#1 - “We’ve become a nation of chronic illness, of violence, of loneliness, depression, and division and poverty.”
#2 - “Our great cities are becoming tent encampments.”
#3 - “Modern-day Hooverville is filled with undocumented immigrants and dispossessed Americans and people living in their cars, plagued by mental illness and addiction and despair.”
#4 - “Our border has come under the control of criminal drug cartels that traffic in desolation and fentanyl — and in busloads of desperate human beings.”
#5 - “Our children are drowning in a crisis of alienation, of dispossession, and complete disconnection from their communities.”
#6 - “We’ve lost far more of our young people to drugs in the last decade than in the 20-year Vietnam war.”
#7 - “We’ve printed nine centuries’ worth of money in a little over a decade and spent $8 trillion on regime change wars. Those wars have made America less safe, our country less strong, and the world far less stable, while sending prices through the roof.”
#8 - “As our infrastructure falls apart, tens of millions of young Americans no longer even dream of owning their own home.”
#9 - “All the new wealth of the last generation has gone to the billionaires and to transnational corporations while our tattered middle class, our infrastructure, our industry, have been hollowed out from the inside.”
#10 - “The public debt has gone from about $5 trillion under President George W. Bush to $34 trillion today.”
#11 - “US household debt is at a record high of $17.3 trillion.”
#12 - “Our true unemployment rate is 23%.”
#13 - “Young parents face housing, grocery and childcare costs that are unaffordable.”
#14 - “Too many Americans are living bleak and hopeless lives.”
#15 - “We rank 40th globally in our people’s health and wellness.”
#16 - “Out of the richest countries in the world, the United States is 35th in child poverty rates.”
#17 - "We rank 36th in literacy and 45th in press freedom."
#18 - “We have one of the highest cancer rates in the world, and our life expectancy now ranks 59th, according to the World Bank.”
#19 - “We now have the worst health outcomes in the rich world, the highest maternal mortality rates, the highest number of gun deaths per capita, and the highest number of teen pregnancies.”
#20 - “According to CDC, 60% of Americans have at least one chronic condition. When my uncle was president, only 6% of Americans had chronic disease.”
#21 - “And all of these plights fall heaviest on our young people:
• Four in ten of them suffer from depression.
• Half of them have considered suicide.
• One in ten has anxiety.
• One in ten has ADHD.
• One in five is obese.
“I want to tell you right now that we can still restore that America, the America that almost was and yet may be,” Kennedy said. “But we have to start by being honest with ourselves.”
Watch Kennedy’s full State of the Union response below:
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