Amazon packagingSome people thought I was just being funny when I said Amazon (AMZN) was a malignant tumor which would one day end the human race. They are laughing a bit less loud now that Amazon is launching its own shipping service, seeking to put both FedEx (FDX) and UPS (UPS) out of business. It’s about time the human species break from the “Me and My” syndrome I wrote about in “John Smith” because chemotherapy won’t work if one waits much longer.

Amazon has been negatively impacting everyone since it was created during Syphilis Willies “Information Super Highway” fraud. Creating a global village without creating a global village council first just to get elected so he could collect even more bribes via future foundation donations. There is not a community with a retail store which has not been negatively impacted. A good many communities no longer have retail.

Huge chunks of America’s social fiber have been ripped out. That is not a shock factor statement. A good many psychologists and behaviorists have been talking and even publishing papers about the social benefits of a large shopping mall. Some of it is a bit of the Tuscan tradition of going out to meet your neighbors regularly (okay, they do it nightly) and some of it are the direct health benefits.

Yeah, I know. A mall typically had really unhealthy food in the food court, but the mall itself did provide health benefits to the community around it. Long before the stores opened, cars, vans and buses full of seniors and physically recovering people would show up in sneakers and sweats to walk their N miles in doors each morning. Rain, hail, shine, it didn’t matter. As long as they could get to the mall in a vehicle, they could exercise.

While it may seem difficult to believe, there is a health benefit to teenagers working and having the social interactions required in a retail environment. We always hear the phrase “support network” but we never really know what it is. We say “friends and family” but that’s not the complete or the correct definition. It’s the family that you make which may or may not include parts of the family you are born into. The contents of this family change over time, but it usually begins to seriously form around people you work with in what you consider your first _real_ job, not the fake on-line Facebook, Twitter and other social media “friends” you think are so important.

Opioid use is gathering all of the headlines now and it is pushing from the more important headline out of the spotlight. Smart phone use is leading to an increase in teen depression and suicide. The content doesn’t matter. All of that time shopping at Amazon or the clickbait in their Facebook feed, designed to keep you on longer viewing even more ads, is slowly wiping out a big chunk of a generation. They lack the healthy social interactions they would have gotten working at those retail shops Amazon put out of business. We can all agree that depression leads to using recreational substances. Many times those uses turn into addictions because the depression does not go away. It only seems to for a little while. If all of your “social interactions” come from a fake on-line world, then the fake happiness brought about from opioid use is just as real as the bulk of your life.

This entire Internet as an advertising medium was a bad idea from the beginning.