You may have heard of the concept of retrospective coronation — the idea of looking back, and well after the fact deciding that a moment or phenomenon was the key event in history, even though at the time there was no sign of its significance. In evolution, for instance, there’s this idea of “mitochondrial Eve,” that a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years ago there was one human woman walking around who was the ancestor of everyone living today. If we had a time machine and went back to that era, though, she’d be unrecognizable, no one special, and the only thing that actually distinguishes her is future events, many of them driven by chance. That’s the retrospective part, that such a person can only be recognized with hindsight.
I think I’ve found a complementary concept: retrospective invisibility. Or maybe it’s the same thing? It’s the idea that because we didn’t see something happening in the past, it isn’t real now or then. Here’s a perfect example:
Cool. Amazing. How true. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I didn’t know anyone who’d been diagnosed with autism. Not a one!
I did know lots of kids who couldn’t concentrate, or who were weird, or could never get their homework done on time, but we just called them stupid and let ’em fall through the cracks.
I didn’t know any kids with life-threatening allergies, but that was because it was their own look-out. You couldn’t expect other kids to worry about whether a peanut could kill another kid; that was their problem. I imagine there were quite a few parents who were quietly desperate about keeping their kid’s failed biology quiet while trying to insulate them from a dangerous world.
I did know kids who had chronic illnesses that kept them out of school all the time. I don’t know what the heck was wrong with them. They were just weak, I guess.
I did get exposed to some of the secret stuff, though. My grandfather was a custodian at a ‘special school,’ and I sometimes helped him out. I met a few of my peers there, kids I’d grown up with until suddenly, they disappeared. If a kid had behavioral problems, or if a young girl got pregnant, whoosh, they were whisked off to Thomas School, and all the mainstream kids could forget about them.
A few times, I talked to a girl my age there. I liked her. She’d gotten pregnant — a bad influence, so they disappeared her. They later took the child away. She stayed in the “special school,” where she suffered from depression, another of those things that didn’t exist in the 1970s for teenagers.
There was also another “special school” on the other side of town, a Catholic school for boys where all the troublemakers were sent. It had a terrible reputation. But on the bright side, all the kids who were bouncing off walls were kept there, so we could pretend they didn’t exist!
Another tremendous bonus: now people of that era can look back on their youth and proudly brag about how wonderful those days were, without a single cloud in the sky. We clearly need to bring back special schools for bad kids and juvenile halls and good ol’ sanatoriums where we can lock away our troubled youth and forget they exist. Workhouses and prisons! The wave of the future!
There’s a related thing I encountered on next door, but they were trying to imply that liberalism was why there were more LGBT+ people in California. I pointed out the suppression and they basically acted astonished I would suggest that.
Must have imagined my sister in and out of hospital with asthma, including her crying in an oxygen tent…
Poor Carole Mac, however, endured growing up in a time when she might have had to encounter kids with high melanin counts and/or “Z”s ending their last names.
Surely she craves most of all to live through her parents’ childhoods, when such indignities were neither seen nor mentioned.
When I was young I didn’t know any psychopathic/sociopathic people spewing hate all around them. Nowadays the internet is full of such people, and some even become leaders of nations.
Anyone else?
PZ seems to have left out the “Reform Schools”, where juvenile delinquents were sent. These were almost all males.
It didn’t take much to get sent there either.
In my area where I grew up, being sent to Reform School was common. We all knew kids who had been there.
It wasn’t considered all that unusual.
It seems we must create a new category of disabled. Those completely oblivious to anyones issues that don’t directly affect them. Call them “The Oblivii”. Lump them in with “Affluenza”.
It’s easy to find confirming evidence. A Google Scholar search for “peanut allergy school” finds the 1979 article “Food allergy in children with hyperactivity, learning disabilities and/or minimal brain dysfunction” at http://adhdbasics.info/library/lib/Tryphonas1979.pdf concludes “A causal relationship between food allergy and a small subgroup of children with a primary diagnosis of hyperactivity is suspected. “.
Another is the 1978 article “Does Diet Affect Hyperactivity?” at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002221947801100611 saying “Twenty-four hyperactive children were tested with sublingual foods and dyes followed by a seven-day diet omitting milk, wheat, egg, cocoa, corn, sugar, and food coloring, and by subsequent individual ingestion challenges with these same food items. … Twelve children improved to a moderate or marked degree during the seven-day diet. … Improvement persisted in children who avoided offending food dyes or foods for at least 12 weeks.”
The journal’s site advised me to read the 1980 paper “Can What a Child Eats Make Him Dull, Stupid, or Hyperactive?” at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002221948001300510 with more on the topic, like how in 1956 “an alert mother convinced me (somewhat against my will!) that her 12-year-old son’s” medical issues were due to milk in his diet.
The kid at described in this 1976 case report was allergic to both milk and peanut butter. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2378555/pdf/canfamphys00314-0102.pdf
In the 1970s I was one of the kids in the primary school playground with an inhaler. There were some days, especially when the grass and tree pollen was high, where if I hadn’t had it I wouldn’t have been able to run around like all the other kids. Naturally, having something different like that made me a target for a certain type of individual who thought it funny to try to take it from me. Why do I get the feeling that Carole Mac might identify with those people? Or is she going to deny that they existed too?
In my school in 1980s Germany things were a bit more progressive – the “problem kids” had a special class in the general school. Of course the focus was only on their lack of academic success, no one bothered with the cause for their problems. And yes, for the rest of us, they were the “srupid kids”-
Not that their teachers were of any help one way or another, they seemed to have more issues than most of the kids.
And yes, we definitely had kids with bad Asthma, serious allergies and at least one autisr (me), though I was only known as tthe weird kid of course.
The Hygiene Hypothesis may explain the increase in food allergies. Apparently kids are supposed to be dirty like Pig-Pen from Peanuts.
I was in elementary school in the 1990s:
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure at least a couple of my friends were on the spectrum although, to the best of my knowledge, no one in my classes had an official diagnosis. However, this was more a function of the extreme poverty where I grew up than anything else.
-I don’t remember anyone who specifically had a gluten, peanut, or milk allergy, but I definitely knew people with severe allergies. I was one of them; I had a severe grass allergy, which didn’t stop my teachers from forcing me to do PE in the grass or participate in track, which used grass tracks. I nearly died a couple of times, and WOULD have died if I hadn’t had my inhalers. One of my best friends had a severe aspirin allergy.
-I knew several people who obviously had ADHD, but couldn’t afford to get a diagnosis, let alone treatment. I also had ADHD, though I wasn’t diagnosed until my mid-twenties (this wasn’t a matter of money, but of family pride). It made school a living hell for me, to the point that I first began planning to commit suicide in fourth grade because I couldn’t take spending every waking moment on homework that was never good enough for my teacher. The only reason I never followed through was that I certain I’d screw that up, too.
-One of my best friends had rheumatoid arthritis.
-As I said, I would have died if I hadn’t had my inhalers. I also took nebulizer treatments for at least 30 minutes a day, and sometimes for as much as 2 hours a day, throughout grade school.
A couple of other things:
I knew an assortment of people who were almost certainly suffering from mental illness, but could neither afford diagnosis or treatment. Those few who could would never have admitted it, however, because weakness makes one vulnerable to predators, and elementary school is full of those. I was the only (partial) exception I knew to the never admit it rule- I told everyone that I had seen a therapist. I used that to bolster the reputation I already had as a “psycho” in order to encourage bullies to leave me alone.
I knew no one who would admit to being LGBTQ+ in grade school, for the same reason that no would ever admit to anything that might mark them as part of any despised minority. Quite a few of my friends were LGBTQ+, some rather obviously so in retrospect, but they weren’t out. One friend even confessed his love to me (I also identified as a “he” at the time, because I wasn’t aware that there were any other options), to which I was totally oblivious, because A.) such things simply weren’t done and B.) it turns out that I’m so bad with social cues that someone can literally be screaming “I LOVE YOU” at me and I’ll still misinterpret it as an expression of overenthusiastic platonic camaraderie until I see them with their new boyfriend 25 years later and I’m like “OOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHH, he meant it that way!”
Wow, did I ever feel shitty about the way I’d responded, when I finally figured that one out.
Relevant on different levels.
https://wit.substack.com/p/the-memeification-of-dr-johnson
…and then I accidently hit the post button…
We also had a girl who really prefered boy’s clothes and playing with the boys and just behaved like a boy. But I’m pretty sure trans men did not exist back then.
In Baltimore, there was a school for pregnant students well into the 1990s. My mom, who worked as a school cafeteria manager in the Baltimore City Public School System, worked at such a school from ’96-2000. The youngest student there during her tenure was a 12-year-old girl.
I was also in elementary school in the 70s.
– We had heard of peanut allergies in the 70s. Seemed weird. I know there was PTA talk about peanut butter sandwiches in school lunches. I didn’t care as long as I could still do what I wanted with my sack lunch.
– There were definitely “hyper” kids who were always bouncing and mostly distracted. They were not diagnosed at the time and instead were usually seen as problem children, always getting in trouble.
– Autoimmune problems came into everyone’s consciousness in the 80s as eventually even Reagan admitted that AIDS was a thing.
– I distinctly remember a few kids with inhalers. If I had a day when my nose was runny and they looked miserable, it was allergies and I wasn’t coming down with a cold.
Is Carole Mac’s point just that diagnosis has improved? Because it clearly has.
Yep…it’s just like that adage that a conservative isn’t concerned about a particular hazard/health problem/environmental crisis/pregnancy complication until it happens to them or a member of their family. It’s not real unless it happened to me/my neighbor.
I knew an autistic kid – next door neighbor – when I was 9, so I know they existed. The father of a friend had asthma, and frequent crises, so I know that existed. Another friend turned up allergic to tree pollen after suffering from a chronic cough for months one year. A schoolmate suffered from anorexia and nearly died, at the age of 13 or 14. Several friends turned up pregnant in HS and dropped out and disappeared, except for one, who bucked the trend, got shotgun married and stayed in till the day she had her daughter, and then she and hubby went on to college. This was the mid-Sixties and norms were being broken everywhere. A good thing. So when I look back on my youth, I am happy to say we were pioneers. The Repubs of today, however, want to return to the halcyon days of yesteryear when they could be racist and homophobic as shit, and not pay any price.
I tried looking at Carole Mac’s feed. That was unpleasant. The stupid is very strong with this one.
I still think back on my childhood and wonder how much better things could have been had I actually had accommodations. I don’t think I would have wanted what their idea of accommodations were then, but kids now have things so much better. There were plenty of LGBT+, ASD, ADHD kids in school then. I happened to have made through as all of those. Her ignorance baffles me.
I was one of those “special” kids who spent most of their childhood at home or in hospital missing school. Yes I was picked on by the bullies and labelled by a few teachers including one school principal. On the other hand I had the sympathy and sometimes open support of other students and a few close friends. I had parents who supported and encouraged me and intervened when there were problems. It was my fathers advocacy and the support of some really good teachers that meant the principal in question didn’t force me down to do subjects at a level that would exclude me from university. I was lucky. Modern medicine meant that by my early teens I could manage my illness to the point that I only missed a few days of school and of anything thanks to a rigorous but enjoyable and productive exercise program meant I was fitter than some of the jocks who pushed me around. Sadly that wasn’t always the case for others. One student was on the receiving end of the ire f a particularly nasty teacher who confiscated his asthma puffer because he was “playing” with it in class. He later had a sever asthma attack and without the puffer medical help arrived too late to save him. My son had a similar school experience early on but once I alerted the school to the problem the schools policies meant most of the problems were dealt with. Judging by Carol Mac’s @Herbs and Dirt tag she is a blinkered vegetarian who thinks that all ills can be solved by a “natural” diet and illness and behaviour problems can all be fixed by proper diet, including I suppose compulsory peanut eating to weed out the unfit.
What I also remember from those days, 1950s and 1960s was the pervasive use of alcohol.
Underage drinking was considered normal and widespread.
And, from about 1964 on, drug use started up and quickly became common. The middle schools and high schools were saturated with drugs, mostly marijuana and the hallucinogens such as LSD. Opiates were still more or less nonexistent, thank Cthulhu.
Primary school in 90s, I knew two hyperactive kids (later diagnosed with ADHD as adults), one of them was in my class. The way our home teacher dealt with it was genious. She’d see this 9 year old fidget and send him outside to run two or three laps (his choice) around the school then come back. He’ll be back five minutes later and pay attention afterwards. Never left the school yard, was never late to come back. Jelena was strict teacher with enormous authority, we were her last generation and she retired when we were 10, 11 years old (3rd grade).
I must admit that when I was in elementary school, I too was unaware of those problems.
There were some thinks I was aware of though: polio, iron lungs, whooping cough, measles, and a couple of other things like friends not being in school the next year, etc.
Of course this was 20 years or so before her experiences.
And the years before that were bad too.
My mother had smallpox but a miracle happened and she lived, though scarred.
Every age has its own problems.
Back in the 70s, some places still dealt with hyperactive children by castrating them.
Meanwhile, in the 80s when I was in grade school, hyperactive and disruptive students got sent to the principal’s office for spankings. It was a Catholic school and the principal was a nun with a big wooden paddle she kept behind her desk. Don’t know if she actually used it on students but she sure threatened to.
High school in late 60s . Had a gay friend who almost died because of some asshole decided that he didn’t have the right to live in peace. Sister had occasional mild asthma attacks . I had exactly one due to stress . Sister’s attacks were probably due to the same reason – a sadistic toxic father! No one else I knew had allergies except a 2nd cousin with hay fever which made her miserable . I remember a boy who liked to fight being sent to reform school during elementary school. Luckily he decided he didn’t want to be there and later became class Vice President in high school. I had a class mate in elementary school who was severely depressed , despite that, she was extremely popular but like Michael Jackson she thought she had an ugly nose . ( I don’t know what was wrong with black parents abusing a child over the shape of their nose or having kinky hair back then. Poor MJ wasn’t the only one . It does a serious number on your self esteem! )
I was a teenager from 73 to 79.
I knew two kids with peanut allergies. One that suffered an accidental attack once due to a cookie.
I have an auto immune disease that first hit me when I was 14, but at the time, they didn’t call my disease (Crohn’s) an auto-immune disease, and by the way my father and Dwight Eisenhower also both had it long before the 70s.
I had a good buddy in the very early 70s before I was a teenager who had asthma and an inhaler.
nomdeplume @ # 4: When I was young I didn’t know any psychopathic/sociopathic people spewing hate all around them.
Y’all must be from Up Nawth somewhere, ain’tcha?
I had a sports teacher try to kill me by demanding I stay on the oval in the middle of an asthma attack during a pollen surge because, as half the PE teachers at the time believed, asthma is imaginary. I walked off anyway. The teacher threatened to report me to the principal but I never heard anything more about it, so I’ll never know if the teacher decided against it or the principal thought it was too stupid a notice to follow up on.
Seems pretty obvious that the better the diagnostic process, the greater the apparent prevalence of diagnosed conditions becomes.
A similar thing for attributes or attitudes that are socially deprecated, of course — the greater the social tolerance, the more pervasive they apparently become.
I guess Just Heumann just imagined that she was barred from entering kindergarten in 1953 because the school said her wheelchair was a fire hazard and again in 1970 when New York State denied her aa teaching license in 1970 with the same excuse.
@25 more your way down south…
My sister and I went to school in the seventies.
I knew a child with a peanut allergy. I knew a child with a milk allergy (I don’t know if this was an actual milk allergy or a way to explain lactose intolerance to kindergardeners). I knew a kid who had to use an inhaler. (School policy was that she couldn’t keep it on her but had to leave it with her teacher, which almost killed her when we had a substitute.) I knew a kid with what looked like plaque psoriasis on his face, though I never talked to him and had him confirm that diagnosis.The kids just called him scaleface. A friend of my sister died of cancer in middle school And I was the kid with ADD. I guess none of us existed.
The odd thing is, I wasn’t social at all as a kid. I did my dead level best to interact with as few students as possible throughout my gradeschool life. If someone like me knew people with all those conditions, just how oblivious was Carole Mac?
Odd, my personal experience in the ’60’s and ’70’s was the opposite of the sheltered snowflake.
And autoimmune wasn’t a thing? So, hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism didn’t exist, juvenile diabetes was fiction, as was juvenile arthritis fictional as well? Just to name a few heavy hitters well known and even mass advertised for that era.
Gluten was harmless, because obviously, the 1970’s happened before the second century, when Aretaeus first reported celiac disease.
And hyperactive kids, just needed to beat them in the head with a brick or something similarly character building to beat disease away.
And I had a severe, damned near killed me milk allergy as an infant.
Oh, autism was classified back in those dark ages as “mental retardation”, with Asperger’s being “high functioning”.
Do, to be at my most diplomatic best, I’d happily tell Ms DirtnHerbs that she’s a lying sack of shit, well past its compost by date.
Oh, there were no inhalers on the playground, they were in the custody of the school nurse, who would argue with the student gasping for breath. Something I personally witnessed.
I was one of those kids who was either ignored (was an outcast) or was regularly beaten up–because I limped, was in and out of the hospital, and so on. My youngest brother was a kid who was also in/out of the hospital but later recovered enough to use an inhaler (when he was able to go to school at all.) Another brother was “home-schooled” because kids who were blind or “multiply-handicapped” or deaf had no right to a public education at the time. I must have hallucinated hearing the president of the local school board repeatedly and publicly referring to kids like me as “icky” and saying he didn’t want his kids exposed to us. This was in the 50s and 60s of the last century. The privileged kids like the one complaining in the cited post were the bullies doing the beating-up and taunting, making sure we misfits knew we didn’t belong. Them were the good old days she and others of her ilk are so nostalgic for. Well, fuck her and the privileged-ass horse she rode in on.
Man, virtually everyone has milk allergies. Every mammal has it once it’s mature.
The only exception are some homo sapiens from Northern European descent.
Yeah, I know lactose intolerance isn’t an allergy. It doesn’t plead for @HerbsandDirt that she doesn’t.
People should stop using their ignorance as an excuse for bigotry.
rietplum @33
Various sub-Saharan African groups who have a tradition of pastoralism, such as the Maasai among others, also can tolerate dairy intooccasions.
In fact, cow blood and milk are big parts of their diet since they rarely slaughter and eat their cows. They usually meat for special occassions.
Most of the schooling was in the 60’s. I remember when the principal would come on with announcements at the start of the school year and mention a friend or classmate who had passed over the summer due to illness or serious accident. There was never any offer of counselling being available to students who might have known them. Why did we have school counsellors? The attitude was, of course, take your grief and choke on it.
You do plumb the depths. I have to hand it to you.
I took a look at this heather’s site. Well. I guess anything for the money.
I noticed that mass shootings were completely absent in her list, including worry about not getting a bullet proof backpack, or panic when the occasional vehicle backfiring could be heard.
I grew up in the 70s knowing my life wasn’t safe from psychopathic white people who wanted to exterminate people who looked like me and made no secret aobut that.
I grew up in the inner city so I guess it must’ve been real nice for her to have been completely oblivious to the existence of other types of students from the depths of her white suburban upbringing. All was rosy in her world. Good for her.
nomdeplume @ # 29: … your way down south…
Yet you never heard “psychopathic/sociopathic people spewing hate all around”?
Maybe my experiences (in Mississippi & Louisiana) were a little more hardcore – but I heard racist rants routinely.
In the summer of 1983 the teenaged son of family friends died of an asthma attack after a hike with friends. His inhaler was next to his body when he was found, apparently he wasn’t able to use it in time.
I first became aware of autism when a grandfather of an autistic child committed murder-suicide in 1978 (or perhaps 1977). An advocacy group for autistic people was founded by Leah Rabin in 1974.
I became aware of celiac when a consumers’ rights television program advocated for government subsidies for gluten-free bread (or gluten-free flour mixes). This was probably in the early 80s.
Many of the kids with special needs were hidden to some extent from kids like me because they attended special schools – schools for deaf children, schools for kids with severe behavior problems, schools for kids with physical disabilities (my school had stairs everywhere and no elevators), schools for kids with assorted learning disabilities. I became aware of them either due to news stories, or when advocacy groups had public events to collect donations for them, or when my school involved me in community service work for the special schools (in 11th grade I spent about one school day per month in a class for children with behavior problems, preparing classroom materials for the teacher), or rarely, when a ‘special’ child was somehow involved in my life (there was a kid in one of my after school activities who very likely had Down’s Syndrome; a family on my street lost 2 sons to some kind of muscular dystrophy). Things are better these days when people who are ‘different’ in some way are more visible, and ‘we’ can’t pretend they don’t exist.
@40 Down South …. in Australia ….
Heh.
In the 70s:
I knew a child who would be rightly diagnosed as autistic.
I had family members with food allergies.
Some of my friends, family andI would be rightly diagnosed with ADHD.
I guess I lived in a different 1970s.
“My then honest ignorance and self-centeredness, natural to pretty much all children, has been brutally and unfairly corrected by my experience of reality as an adult! PEOPLE – KIDS INCLUDED! – GET WHAT THEY DESERVE! I obviously deserve not only to enjoy my privileged, protected and ever-flattered white American life, but to do so without being bothered by even the knowledge of, much less any need to deal with, all these unpleasant people who make my life comfortable but look or think different from me – and that includes anyone whose troubles, even those whose misfortune is entirely unearned, to remind me of my (current) luck and (limited) privilege! Unless I want to play at ‘charity’! I’M A GOOD PERSON BECAUSE I SAY SO! YOU’RE A BAD PERSON BCAUSE YOU DON’T IMMEDIATELY PRAISE ME!”
Yeah, Louisiana elementary school in the 50/60’s. Lovely memories. All white classmates. “Funny” kids were called retards. We had some polio kids with steel leg braces, but we kindly ignored them. Girls had cooties. The Principal would give you an option: swat or a note home. We always took the swat because a note home would result in a torture session and my mother was one session away from being tried in The Hague. We had the “bus kids” from the rural areas and we ignored them because we were better. Some of us were a “handful” and they sent us off twice a month to “Rapid Learners” where we learned to be arrogant asses. There were rules for fighting: never hit a kid with glasses and no biting.
On the plus side, we all wanted to be scientists or rocket engineers as the space program was in full swing. And, yes, we did practice Duck and Cover in preparation for a nuclear attack. Good times.
I don’t know if anyone else read the series “Swallows and Amazons” as a child. They were written in the 1930s, and in the second book a boy called Roger isn’t allowed in the dusty cave “because it makes him cough”. Guess what – Roger has asthma! The real boy who Roger was (loosely) based on had asthma, and went on to develop the first preventer inhalers for asthma treatment.
Even earlier, my grandfather’s aunt had coeliac (and therefore couldn’t eat gluten). The medical advice wasn’t always correct, and I think she didn’t always follow it, so she kept getting sick. So there’s another example.
my reaction to all of these type of nostalgic what ever you want to call them is they are the result of ignorance and selective memory and are completely distorted and BS
m*** A****** G**** A*** my ass
I went to school in the fifties and sixties. The kids with ADHD flunked and became bullies or victims or both. The bullies ran the society. No inhalers and the kids with asthma just gasped. The sick kids stayed sick. The autistic kids were in institutions and the black kids were somewhere else. The word “sexism” was not in use, but the thing was in force. But yeah, I was white, male, middle class, healthy, and yeah those were the good old days for some of us, but so what?
What a shallow, privileged entitled idiot. I graduated in ’79, I was the kid asshats like you made fun of. I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease in ’77. Celiac is NOT an allergy. It IS an autoimmune disease. It nearly killed me- I lost 40lbs from a 5’8″ 150lb frame. My intestines were so damaged that when I ate anything, it passed through chewed up but otherwise undigested 5-10 minutes later. I nearly starved to death, in other words. A biopsy diagnosed it.
I also had Type 1 Restless Legs Syndrome, which was virtually unknown to every doctor I saw until I was in my thirties. I have ADD/HD and a Nonverbal Learning Disability. There wasn’t enough information or education among physicians in the ’70s to diagnose this stuff.
Please stop advertising your shocking amount of ignorance, and in your case, willful ignorance as the information about all the stuff you claim did not exist DID in fact exist.
Here are the US childhood death rates for various age groups from 1970 to 2018.
Let us yearn for the good old days when children were 2-3 times as likely to die per year!
(If you’re wondering about that recent bump in older teen deaths, it was mostly car accidents, gun deaths, and opiate overdoses. Since 2020, firearms have surpassed motor vehicles as the leading cause of child mortality. And of course, around half of deaths from car accidents involve a drunk or high driver. Guns & drugs, drugs & guns.)
Here are the US childhood death rates for various age groups from 1970 to 2018.
Let us yearn for the good old days when children were 2-3 times as likely to die per year!
(If you’re wondering about that recent bump in older teen deaths, it was mostly car accidents, gun deaths, and opiate overdoses. Since 2020, firearms have surpassed motor vehicles as the leading cause of child mortality. And of course, around half of deaths from car accidents involve a drunk or high driver. Guns & drugs, drugs & guns.)
Speaking of guns, I notice this Carol Mac person (whose address “HerbsandDirt” suggests a “naturalist” New-Ager who doesn’t put “chemicals” in her body) says nothing about kids being killed via guns, either accidentally or by being shot by armed lunatics. Why the omission, I wonder? Didn’t give a shit about shooting deaths?