What is the world's and particularly the USA's biggest problem?
The economy? The divisiveness between the right and left? Our meshuggena President? The Socialists who want to take over the White House? Crime? Suicide [about a million a year and over 120 a day in the US]? Abortion [over 30 million world wide this year alone]? North Korea? Iran? Turkey? The opioid epidemic? Chazanim singing off key?
These are all huge problems.
But what is from a moral and Torah perspective just about the biggest problem on the planet is ... PRITZUS.
Hold on tight:
On Saturday, The New York Times published a sobering report about the recent explosion of online child pornography. According to the story, in 2018 there were a record 45 million photos and videos of child sexual abuse reported by tech companies, a monumental increase from only a few years ago. Law enforcement officials have been overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of cases, logistically unable to properly investigate every report. Faced with the equivalent of a rapidly sinking boat, federal agencies have been asked to fix it with nothing more than a bucket to bail out the water—a hopeless task.
The increased exposure brought to the issue of pornography is a welcome development. The proliferation of sexually abusive imagery, especially child pornography, has reached crisis levels in recent years, demanding a robust response from our political leaders. The Times report suggests that we must address the shortage of resources available to law enforcement. However, while certainly a crucial part of any response, this would only scratch the surface of the real problem.
The uncomfortable truth is that the rapid growth in child pornography is connected to the cultural normalization of online pornography as a whole. While research on the issue is relatively scarce, a number of studies have shown a relationship between habitual porn use and escalation to more deviant types. This makes intuitive sense. Just as a habitual drug user builds up a tolerance for a drug and is compelled to continually seek out stronger and more dangerous forms to achieve the same effect, so many porn users may find themselves engaging in the same process. Unfortunately, porn is more widely available and less stigmatized than drugs, leaving many more people vulnerable to its effects.
The full extent of porn’s current influence is alarming. According to the most popular pornography website, users viewed 4.6 billion hours of porn on its site in 2016 alone. Moreover, surveys have consistently shown that large numbers of people regularly use porn, including—most distressingly—young people, whose brains are not fully developed and thus far more susceptible to the effects of psychological stimuli. One recent poll found that 64 percent of respondents aged 13–24 actively seek out porn on a weekly basis, while another study of college males found that about half had first encountered porn before age 13.
This is not just a problem for the general population. Like everything else it seeps in to the Jewish world as well. The emotional and spiritual harm of watching pornography is not something I can describe in one or even one million posts.
This is high-level-emergency and how come so little is being done to combat this?
