`Two are better than one’ … Why heroin now?

“Two are better than one … for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.” King Solomon

Those who know me will find it strange to read me quoting the Bible.

But these words, which I just read for the first time, talk about what we’ve lost and what has tenderized the country for widespread heroin and pain-pill addiction described by the CDC/DEA in my blogpost below.

We are an enormous country too often isolated, siloed in our rooms/phones/cars alone.

The magnificent ethos of self-reliance that began this country has decayed into one that holds that the individual is always superior to community – though self-reliance was only made possible by assets the community provides.

It holds that the private sector is efficient and government cloddish. It holds the free market as a kind of God, infallible.

It holds that every tax dollar will be wasted by government, so we starve it and make sure it cannot provide the basis for community that is its natural role. Yet mediocrity in business is to be rewarded with towering compensation, and part of that is that we’ll look the other way as it destroys jobs that sustain our communities.

And this reigning ethos further insists that consumption, and by extension the avoidance of discomfort and the eternal search for convenience, is our point on earth.

In such a world, naturally legions of people dose themselves on substances that numb pain – drugs that turn everyone addicted to them into hyperconsumers, self-absorbed and alone, and with no one to help them when they fall.