Ok, here's what I'm going to say... to quote Happy Gilmore, " I see what you're trying to do to me right now and I dont like it. "
You're putting words in my mouth. I don't like that. Please, don't do that. What I wrote was, " I have as much sympathy for the daughter of Whitney Houston as I have for anyone else, and for overdosed drug addicts, I don't have much. Drug addicts do it to themselves. Let this be a lesson learned to some fool out there. "
You write back quoting literature, and tell me that addicts are people and they are human. No smuck, Sherlock, I know this. I feel like you are talking down to me in a self righteous way, especially when you continue on with, " you offer me peace " as if you have some sort of holy, righteous secret, that I just don't seem blessed to have, but you're just going to give it to me. Judge not. Now, a command.
Ok then, judge not, and stop putting words into my mouth.
We have an ugly media culture that preys on the sickness and sin of addicts and fellow humans, dehumanizes people with " celebrity," and we regular folk help themselves run themselves down by tuning in. We say, " oh that poor fellow human, I hope he gets some help," or " I am so sympathetic, " but in the end we are sitting at home feeling good about ourselves, that it's not us, feeling good about the charity of our recognizing their humanity, saying self serving prayers.
After being on the street in my youth, I saw friends die from cocaine, heroin, meth addiction, pill overdoses. I spent Wednesday night weeping about an overdosed friend. I had one friend when I was younger, who ended up chopped up in garbage bags and stuffed up a chimney. Some people don't o.d. but can't cut it in real life without the addictions and kill themselves straight up. Got a long list of those all through my past too.
They were all human. Humans who threw themselves away, while other people tried to dig them out the entire time they were sinking. It's a crime to kill another, and those who do are hopefully caught and punished of breaking the hearts of the loved one left behind. But when addicts kill themselves, there's no one left behind to punish. He who pays the price is the one who couldn't make the save, and do the assist.
For the survivors of their loved one's drug deaths and the survivors of addict suicides, there is no peace, because the loss of people you loved from your life is an all encompassing permanentness, a never ending torture, a constant walk down a dark hallway with no end in sight, a never ending nightmare on a sinking ship in a torrential rain. A complete and total loss of power.
The pain, anguish, and hatred inside of inside of me, my despair in humanity, my loss of faith, is in good part, because of addictions. To say anything else would be a lie. I wear that reality since my friends started to die in this chemical wasteland.
There's no puppies, no kittens, just tough love. Addicts take my life too, every time they go away, they take a piece of me with them.
So I give up. I got nothing.