To The Editor:
I am seldom moved to tilt at windmills, but once in a while ...
A few weeks ago, there was an item on the TV news making a big deal out of the “new” idea that kids who grow up in abusive environments are more likely to get addicted to opiates.
Umm ...
This is new? Doesn’t anyone remember that opiates are painkillers? Doesn’t anyone realize that we have millions of people who have to have painkillers to get through the day? Yes, we’re very lucky in all kinds of ways. We’re not starving for food. But we are starving for hope.
The world gets more and more difficult – and painful – to traverse every day, for a huge proportion of the population and the notion that people who are thick-skinned enough to keep on truckin’ in a world like that could possibly be able to figure out how to bring a stop to the opiate epidemic is delusional. People who can ignore the way things are are the problem. They are the good people who do nothing.
It’s not an opiate epidemic. It’s an epidemic of despair, with a loose cannon firing infections in all directions at its center. And the prime cause is the ripping away, year after year, of the average person’s sense of hope for a kinder tomorrow, not a better smartphone. Opiate addiction is a symptom, not the problem itself. It’s just another sign, like cutting, which people do to take their attention away from the ocean of pain slopping over the edges from inside them. And a certain man who got elected in November because of the total, wretched incompetence of the DNC is driving the storm.
Jim Dodds
Waitsfield
