I’m not conceding this election AT ALL. Unless you can show me evidence of President Dewey and President Gore, you will understand that the media does not choose our president for us. They called those elections, too. They both flipped.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to say is that No, we will not be holding hands and singing kumbaya. There will be no “healing and restoration.” I will not be playing hashtag “unity” and hashtag “community goodwill.”
I have just spent the last four years being demonized and disrespected by immature bullies who did not get what they wanted and used that as permission to call me uneducated, deplorable, brainwashed, hateful, a racist, a bigot, and other assorted names.
I’ve just spent 7 months practically locked down in my home over a complete lie. I’ve now barely got an income and I’ve watched far too many small businesses die. I’ve seen people lose their homes. I’ve watched people overdose on drugs and struggle with mental health and suicide issues and I’ve suffered tone deaf public officials and local leadership that just doesn’t care.
I’m not interested in forgiveness, instead I’m ready to see some people go to prison. What has been done to us is a human rights violation.
Don’t even get me started about “the church” at large. Some of the most vicious attacks have come from that direction, from the tolerance teams and the woke ones. I sure sucked some sour grapes today (November 7) reading those very same people trying to claim, NOW we need to pray for our leaders, we all just need to be more Christ-like!
No. Your authority is completely revoked. If I need to be more Christ-like, He’ll tell me.
I’ve grown up, I’ve learned a few things and I’ve gained some self respect. I will never again compromise my beliefs or my values just to help other people feel better. Relationships with people are no longer important to me and I won’t waste one moment investing in them. I’d rather be alone.
It’s a good place to be.
[Originally published November 7, 2020 at insanitybytes blog]
Fortunately COVID-19 has not killed anyone in Jefferson County, but addiction sure has. We don’t really need the CDC to validate those numbers. But they have: more young people have died of drug overdoses and suicides since this pandemic began than of COVID-19. For as long as I can remember that’s been the story in Port Townsend, too. People have been dying of drug overdoses, car crashes, or suicides, a reality that has only gotten worse and more pronounced.
Addiction comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. Those who get caught up in it don’t just hurt themselves, they destroy the lives of all around them. Children lose their parents, parents lose their children. There is more than enough misery to go around, so much suffering that it is often generational, this inheritance of grief, despair, and dysfunction that gets inflicted on the next generation.
It’s an invisible epidemic in the sense that nobody really wants to talk about it. Our local political leadership speaks in vague innuendos about “the homeless” or “mental health issues.” We all care so, so much about those protected classes but not enough to actually diagnose the problem properly and to name it for what it is. And certainly not enough to declare it the public health emergency it really is.
It’s a vicious cycle: our depressed economy, lack of good jobs, lack of housing, lack of political leadership, lack of opportunities, and a pro-drug culture make breaking the addiction cycle even more challenging. It’s a multi-faceted problem. Limited economic opportunities often lead people to resort to selling drugs. An inability to find a future and hope in life often leads to using them.
Addicts are not victims. In fact, blaming everything but them probably helps fuel addiction, too. I am just saying it really is a community-wide disease, requiring a community-wide response, and one of the hardest things for me has been accepting that we just haven’t got the will or the desire to address it collectively. You can’t just blame individuals for their poor choices. We all create the fertile environment that produces these kinds of social issues. Addiction is a symptom; it is not the cause of the disease.
Politically, we often have a tendency to just make everything worse. We seem to diagnose the problem wrong, prescribe the wrong solution, and then throw open the barn doors. I watched Port Townsend become a hot spot for “homeless tourism.” Our leaders are full of compassion for these people, and yet give no thought whatsoever to the fact that our children here are somewhat vulnerable–either naive and sheltered, or at-risk youth–and that the professional homeless are not all just people pursuing an “alternative lifestyle,” but often, actual addicts who support themselves by selling meth and heroin.
The opioid epidemic, the sudden availability of insurance and healthcare, and the ease with which people could get either prescriptions or street drugs also fueled the problem.
I was really sad and yet so very grateful when the Boiler Room saw fit to shut itself down. I watched heroin and meth sweep through this town and I watched young person after young person get caught up in it.
There is help available. There are people who care. We have drug courts and treatment options and a thriving recovery community. But we don’t have a collective community-wide response, a strong political will, and a willingness to name this epidemic for what it is and to say “no.” Not another life.
I have a sister out there on the streets using, a daughter in recovery, and a good 40 years of just watching friend after friend play the revolving-door-game-of addiction, the hospital, jail, and all those 2 am phone calls until one day they just weren’t there anymore. But what I really have is this simmering rage, this deep seated resentment towards a community that cares more about it’s political ideologies than it does about its people, and this keen awareness that no, not all lives matter at all.
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