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I hate to be such a blogging downer today, it is just that the area I live in has such a problem with addiction, meth and heroin mostly. I bear witness to the damage, to the harm being done every single day. Neglected and abandoned kids whose parents are using, young people now living out on the street chasing the dragon themselves. Homeless tourism where you become a haven for professional users, so they all flock here, too.

I’m also nearly powerless to do anything about it. I pray a lot. I try to love on people when I see them, because I have learned that you have to say it right now. Tomorrow they may be gone.

Of course if you’ve ever tried to love on an addict, you’ll understand they aren’t really good at receiving it. Not only are they emotionally anesthetized, they need to continue to feel unloved and rejected on some level in order to continue to justify their self harm.

We enable this rubbish, we fuel the problem with our bleeding hearts, all talking about how abused people are, how discriminated against, how nobody cares about them, how mean the world is. Addicts just eat those lies right up. When your circumstances are allegedly everybody else’s fault, you can use substances with  impunity. Or you think you can anyway. Impunity actually means “freedom from the injurious consequences of an action.”

Death is a rather “injurious consequence.”  Addiction kills. It steals lives, young lives so full of hope and potential.

A big part of my frustration comes from those bleeding hearts who care so, so much……..about their own virtue signaling.  They like to mask the truth in social justice words like “homelessness” and “mentally ill,” as if addicts are simply marginalized victims,  in their situation through no fault of their own.

It’s actually a whole lot easier to say, we have a “housing crisis” than to say we have a meth and heroin epidemic. We have broken families, abused children, and generational curses. We have a drug culture promoting heavy alcohol use (and now marijuana) as  healthy and beneficial, good for the economy even. We have political policies that make everything worse. We have a culture that rejects faith, that distrusts the church, that perceives Christianity as oppressive, mean-spirited, full hypocrisy. We have indoctrination that has now separated a few generations from the things in the world that work together to create emotional and spiritual stability. Resilience.

It’s tough getting older here in the 9th circuit of hell because now I can remember things like a little boy once playing in my sprinkler one summer, all sun-kissed and happy. Or a baby girl picking berries, full of expectation, just about ready to embrace life on her own.

They didn’t make it. Neither of those kids survived the heroin and meth epidemic. I had to standby helpless and watch them die. It hurts, it’s painful. It is such a waste of so much life, so much potential. It’s just heartbreaking.

I sometimes say, trying to love an addict is like going through surgery without anesthesia. Addicts tend to forget and to not feel their own pain. The rest of us get to live and experience your story fully sober, and to feel what you cannot.

I get frustrated watching the community put up walls, watching local government so self-righteous about what they think they know, they don’t even listen. I get frustrated with the denial, the invisibility of this problem,  the way  the truth is always hidden behind vague innuendos and buzzwords, words about “homelessness” and the “mentally ill,” and “marginalized people.”

We aren’t a community that doesn’t care, we are a community that doesn’t know how to tough love people to good health, how to say no, a community that doesn’t seem to understand that our adoration of individualism is actually not a loving thing at all.

But mostly, I just get tired of watching addicts die.