We lost another member of our community to the opioid crisis

Early this morning, we lost another member of our community to the opioid crisis, did anyone know her? My condolences go out to her family and friends, this must be a very difficult time.

Through life, you can bet that she faced difficulties that would probably be hard to imagine. This member of our community lost her way, and slipped through the cracks. I don’t know her story but maybe you do. What I do know, is that she had lost most everything.

When she was a baby, you can bet that people clambered around her exclaiming how special and precious she was – and it couldn’t be more true. Imagine how that must of felt for her as she grew and then spiraled, and how it would have felt to those who were close to her.

Step ahead to now – when she gave out what would be her last cry for help as an adult, we failed her as a society and as a community. Because make no mistake, the people under the throes of addiction are crying out for help – whether they say it or not, and whether you think they deserve the help or not.

They don’t have it easy, they are struggling to cope and survive. There are so many reasons why people have ended up at at this state, many things that can be hard to understand let alone relate to.

But we should at least be able to understand and agree that this young lady needed more help. At least that’s what I hope. Whether or not we can agree on that, unfortunately she didn’t get enough of the kind of help she needed before it was too late.

How many more members of our community are we going to lose before we can reach some sort of common ground on this – that we need to work together and help these people. These people are someone that can have a future, they are someone’s family member, they are someone’s friend. It could be someone in your family or a friend next, and for many – it has been. We are in a serious crisis here.

The bottom line in my opinion is this. We are seriously failing here as a community and society around this, and we need to do better as a community to try and help – propagating indifference and making excuses for not helping does exactly that – it doesn’t help, just as enabling doesn’t help either. So the fault doesn’t lay on any one person for this. The fault lays on us all collectively.

We can’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist. We can’t make excuses that continue the status quo. It’s up to us all to stand together where we can and do our best to keep all of our community safe as best as we can.

Let’s try and get past this polarized nonsense, it’s of no help. I get it – it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating for everyone we all share that feeling. Yet, this isn’t a simple problem, and there isn’t a simple answer. What is actually making excuses that cause indifference, and what is enabling a worsened condition – and those two things might be part of the root sources of the polarization.

So maybe we need to just get past that for now and go deeper. So I ask you – to start with, how can we build bridges and overcome our differences of opinions on this subject to an extent that we can at least help out together in some way?

Today we lost another member of our community. Does it matter to you that someone’s future has been stripped away, or that someone’s loved one was lost in tragedy?

Of course it does. So what are we willing to do, to start working together on this?