If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

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Tying anti-abortion positions so tightly to Christianity (especially, popularizing it among protestant sects) and elevating that to a concern above most or all others (American conservative catholicism) was a deliberate move by propagandists in the last century, not something that somehow arose naturally.

Ditto trans stuff becoming a huge concern all the sudden. That wasn't "organic", it's a moral panic ginned up by people with microphones.

There's at least as much cynical-politics-affecting-religion as the reverse in the topics and positions you raise.

[EDIT] My point, as it occurs to me it may not be clear, is that "well most are christian so of course pro-choice or other 'liberal' positions struggle" is not a great explanation of what's going on, because that association isn't so guaranteed as this suggests. Things like social and economic justice are heavily connected to and promoted by christianity in some countries outside the US, but much less-so here. Historically, they have been here, too! More-Christian or less-Christian isn't the only axis here, what "Christian" tends to mean as it relates to politics hasn't been static, and that change has been in no small part driven by elite opinion and propaganda for the purposes of capturing religion for political ends, not from grass-roots demand.

We normalized the rustbelt/loss of famliy farms/loss of real decent jobs in small town America/the cities' working class forgetting those were the pipeline that generated the children that went on be the young vibrant energy that knew how to do things/grew our economy/contributed to our culture and strength.

We normalized children working in sweatshops making our things overseas. We made their suffering a cheap punchline and labeled comedians gritty for normalizing it. Extended the apathy to seniors working Walmart to not starve. To the treatment of factory farmed animals. Extended it to Amazon workers literally forced to piss in soda bottles/dying on the warehouse floor as managers tell co-workers they can't perform CPR to try to keep them alive until an ambulance comes, it's more important they just work around the body. We lost all moral compass and are horrific people. That horribleness/acceptance of horribleness is leaking from consumerism and into more and more just being what our society is now. And cheap social commentary humor absorbed the energy that would have been put to changing things and instead just normalized bad behavior. You don't get Donald Trump without Jon Stewart/Joe Rogan both normalizing behavior and building apathy. We went from serious talk about societal problems in our papers/magazine/church groups/social clubs to nodding our heads as we consumed negative/lowest value humor from comedians, the most depressed/live horrible disgusting lives people in our country.

We made eagle scouts the but of jokes (again crappy humor with crappy results) and convince kids they are too cool for programs that foster everyone coming together and doing shared programs/experiences. We removed so much experiential growth/community that was baked into being a youth in the past. Instead of community sports it's fancy paid programs for the cool kids that get accepted or have high talent. You can't do anything with friends that is cheap let alone a revenue driver (buy fix junk cars, do yardword, do sidework for a friends parent who have their own business). So much we value later in life came from doing things that weren't cool or maybe we didn't want to do when we were kids or we needed to be guided into. Now we let children choose but also don't guide them to making growth choices or protect them so they can do uncool things (other than distracting games maybe or 'cool in a geeky way' things).

We slavishly worshiped the tech economy that pushed bits around in machines but don't really do anything other than replaced workers jobs or figure out how to suck money out of systems as a middle man, and made that our ideal 'dream and future'. Efficiency goes up for what was there, but we arent' really creating new just optimizing while tech bros suck the moving dollars out of the system causing entropy.

Current culture inflicts a horrific level of sexual abuse against young women. Maybe it was always that way and I was naive, but the amount of manipulation/lieing/emotional betrayal by men is unacceptable and beyond anything I experienced in the past. Add in so many more women doing sex work either online but also lots more irl. That really burns someone out/detaches. Between the two our previous social construct is gone and in the new one I personally expect women to just give up on men.

I think that there is something very medically wrong that got waived away as an 'obesity epidemic'. I hope Ozempic will lead to figuring it out and not let it be waived away as 'fat people' one the people impacted has lost the weight but still have problems. I've watched my mom and so many others go from happy, healthy, energtic to putting on weight and every day life just being very very hard that it doesn't make sense.

There's a lot going on. Past America would have addressed things as they came up. But we stopped doing that. We've looked away for so long/from so many things we no longer have a direction to look away to.

The USA really didn't have lockdowns, where people were actually forbidden to leave their homes. Apart from a handful of metro areas, what was actualy implemented were feeble 'stay at home suggestions' with tons of exceptions. It was entirely voluntary, and people broadly ignored them (again, outside a few areas). Around me, everyone was still out and about, eating at restaurants, buying their khakis, and basically ignoring that there was a deadly airborne disease being spread around. The only thing that seemed to be adequately enforced were school closures.

As someone who's immigrated into the United States around 2010s, I have experienced a life in Central Texas that was much better than it was expensive before COVID, and much more expensive than it's good after COVID.