The Labor Day weekend is a great chance for folks in an extended family, some from wildly different walks of life, to come together over great Midwestern food and share just a little bit of their lives with others. These brief glimpses into the soul of people you meet so infrequently can be fascinating and frightening, intriguing and disappointing, but it is always vital and crucial to our growth as social human beings to expose ourselves to all sides of issues, debates, and ideas. It was in that vein that our family Labor Day table got on the subject of a recent Time Magazine cover story, that of the opioid addiction epidemic crippling thousands of Americans from coast to coast.
For those in the more metropolitan areas of the country, it can come as a surprise that the small towns of America are not eternally locked into the Ozzie-and-Harriet, picket-fence-and-golden-retriever stereotype. Another failure of our news media is the proper depiction of what Reagan's America has done to the small town: its economic base hollowed out by massive greedy de facto monopolies, its jobs either outsourced or mechanized, also in pursuit of the golden calf of ever-higher profits, and its schools, roads, and other infrastructure constantly defunded and crumbling thanks to politicians more eager to line their pockets than represent their districts. In this world of despair, desperation, and an economy that tells you there's no choice but to work until you drop dead, it should not be a surprise that the hardest put-upon Americans are turning to drugs to ease the pain.
Prescription painkillers are the gateway drug, pushed by pharmaceutical companies also in search of that rich, rich profit, often to the point where they willingly put dangerous drugs on the market to make a quick buck, content in the knowledge that our neutered regulation system can do nothing to stop them. And so more and more people get addicted, but when the pills are no longer prescribed, or when they can no longer fill the need, you turn to something stronger, which leads to the twin scourges of heroin and meth. We now have a desperate small town population who are constantly told it's their fault that the rich people have all the money, turning in their grief to something, anything that will dull the pain. This pain can be physical from an injury sustained on the job, where your employer will do everything to avoid paying you proper compensation for it (it does cut into profits, after all), to a pain that is easier to hide and harder to find, a pain that strikes to the very core of a human soul.
Addiction is a mental condition. There are literally biological changes that happen within the brain and the body in the case of serious addiction. It alters your brain, and yet there were voices at our family table scoffing at the idea of investing the money, time, and effort of the state into helping these people. There may have been similar incidents over your holiday, or perhaps you've heard it in conversation somewhere. This is the darkest side of the American character: the idea that once your personal self is taken care of, then no one else is worth your time. This is the side of America that put Japanese-Americans in camps in the 1940s and pointed fingers at everyone but themselves during the Red Panic of the 1950s. Simply throwing up your hands and declaring that the situation is unwinnable, and that it's foolish to even try, is not what America is about. This cynicism is the lasting legacy of Ronald Reagan, with his caustic criticism of being "here to help" from the government. The truth of the matter is that the government can help, and more often than not it does, despite massive deregulation and funding cuts.
But it is not enough. America, now experiencing horrific murders on our televisions almost nightly, needs to step up its game and join the rest of the developed world in dealing with mental conditions like addictions. Simply pretending the problem doesn't exist, or cynically declaring that everything is broken and there's no way to fix it, will only make things worse. Be returning tax rates on the richest of the rich to their pre-Reagan levels, essentially demanding the money back we lent them as tax cuts for the past 40 years, we would find the money we need to boost the middle class and, with them, the economy. We would have the money to bring small towns back from the brink, and to properly care for those who have paid the heftiest price of Ronald Reagan's hatred of help. We would have the money to help schools, fix roads, mend bridges, and most importantly Save the Small Towns.
There is no more time for apathy and cynicism. I will admit, I used to be one of those people who decried all politics as useless, until it became very clear that our elected policymakers hold in their hands the tools to bring us into a new Golden Age, or condemn us to the slippery slope of third-world oligarchy. The time is now to take action and make the government work for us, not a fraction of a percent of the ridiculously wealthy. It's time to take care of our own, because however much we want to pretend that it's not our problem, that we're better and above it all, sooner or later it always becomes everyone's problem and those who are suffering in our small towns are damn sure one of our own.
At Your Service,
Doremus Jessup
