Suicide rates, overdoses, shooting sprees, gang violence: they’re all different ways of saying that a lot of people see no purpose in going on living.

It’s hitting the youngest generation the hardest.

Deaths of American children and teens spiked between 2019 and 2021, the result of increased car wrecks, shootings and drug overdoses, according to a Virginia Commonwealth University survey of federal data published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The death rate of youngsters ages 1 to 19 rose 20% in the three-year span, the largest increase in the past 50 years. It reverses a decades-long trend of generally lower death rates thanks to the prevention and treatment of disease.

Dr. Steven Woolf, an author of the report, said he has not seen an increase like this in his career.

“This is a red flashing light,” Woolf added. “We need to understand the causes and address them immediately to protect our children.”

Some of this, especially among teenage girls, can be blamed on the pandemic and the lockdowns, but this is a trend that way underway before all this and still appears to be underway.

The Left has the usual non-answers. More gun control regs, more mental health therapy, free Netflix for all.

The reality is that this is what happens when a culture is cracking up, when people no longer have any meaning or purpose, and start destroying each other and themselves.

We’re not gonna prescribe or legislate our way out of this. It’s a dark night of the human soul.

The Left gets a lot of the blame for destroying the tradition and heritage of the country while providing a destructive garbage culture that offers nothing except anger and victimhood, teaching people that everything is worthless except their politics. But so does social media whose consequences we’re only starting to see.

The negative though is only part of the answer. The bigger problem is that as a society we are starved of the positive. Our culture has been nuked. We have nothing aspirational worth mentioning. No art, no music, no frontiers, no religion and no future. A generation that has been told to live in digital skinner boxes is going mad.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.