Many of my friends from high school are dead. The worst instance is the loss of two of my best friends that I spent countless hours of adventure with. Those dead also include the brothers, sons, boyfriends, and girlfriends of those close to my family.
In most cases, the immediate cause was drugs. It started with weed, alcohol, and cigarettes, and escalated into party drugs, psychedelics, and street drugs. Maybe half were ultimately killed by fentanyl, whether laced into other drugs, taken deliberately for a high, or used for something darker.
You might blame the Chinese drug lords trying their revenge for the Opium Wars, the Mexican drug lords pulling one over on the gringo, or the corrupt officials who let either of them push their poison into our country to begin with. But that doesn’t explain how these kids got into drugs in the first place. It doesn’t explain the insanity or the suicides.
You would be closer to the mark to blame rap music. It’s not polite to notice, but you couldn’t honestly deny it if you saw the fatal descent up close. Rap is almost deliberately concocted to lure kids into delinquent self-destruction. In the case of many of my friends, it did. And between the personalities and the producers, rap is much easier to blame on someone else.
But not everyone was into rap. You would also have to blame punk, alt-rock, and grunge. And anyway, most people don’t die when they listen to the wrong music. Nor does music explain the stories I’ve heard from the next school over where half the art scene is dead. Is art the problem? The subcultures were mostly an opportunistic infection, maybe just an aesthetic expression of the despair and confusion we didn’t know how to feel. Some kids didn’t entirely fit in, or fit too well into the wrong thing, and so they died. What’s weird is how many there were.