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Addicts as canaries

I went for a walk today–it is a splendid day, the sort that I like with mild winds, moving clouds, air ripe with moisture and the possibility of a storm–and it occurred to me that addicts–particularly opioid addicts–are really the Identified Patients of our national social system.

I mean particularly the people for whom the routine risk of sudden death is less to be feared than life without that drug, and all it provides.  People who feel so little a part of our common life that they are willing to play Russian Roulette across wide time spans, knowing that their time is likely to come.

Can we not call sick the culture which produces such people?  A culture where they feel unwanted, unclaimed, and purposeless?  This can happen to rich kids and street urchins.  I knew a woman in college–at Berkeley–who was the daughter of a psychiatrist who wound up living with her drug dealer in Oakland.  Perhaps he became her pimp too.  I lost track of her.  People fall off the grid like that all the time. I only heard about it long after the fact.  All I knew is she stopped attending classes.

But just as sick families produce people with obvious problems, can we not call The American Way of Life in some respects a dysfunctional, non-nourishing, bleak shadow of what is possible in terms of inclusion and the sense that life is meaningful (I just started Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, by the way, and fell in love immediately with the first two pages)?

Are not the completely related phenomena of increasing opioid addiction, increasing suicide, and increasing depression (especially among the young) all dead canaries in our collective coal mine? 

Where are the people coming up with ideas?  I don’t see it.  I see a bunch of fucking douchebags on one side trying to double the speed at which our culture collapses, and a bunch of largely self interested but also, in principle, principled people failing to see the problem.  You have one set of saboteurs, and opposing them people largely asleep at the wheel.  They push Christianity, but that is not going to solve these problems.

My plea would be this: can we at least try to pause the fucking destruction?  I know it won’t happen: too many careers depend on it, and too many wicked, sick people are pushing it with far too much money.  But that would be my plea.  As I shared elsewhere today, I see Trump mainly as a stopgap, as someone who is delaying the pace of the retreat, someone who is buying time for good people to come up with good ideas that may actually work.

I have ideas, but I’m just one fucking small person with a shitload of my own issues.

I’ll keep pushing, and eventually things will start to crystalize for me in ways I can usefully share, but I won’t lie and say I feel any optimism at all.