The Christmas season, as happy as it is, can only exemplify some people's troubles and that is so sad. It's a time of the year when being homeless is being homeless on steroids. It's a time of the year when addicts feel strangely alienated from their loved ones. It's hard to put your addiction on hold to join in the celebration. For them, family ties, worn thin by years of abuse and conflict, seem nonexistence and the world, which was a lonely place for them to start with, now seems to have some kind of a void that defies description.
It's too bad that doing drugs and alcohol doesn't have some kind of a mandatory entry-level program, where the good and bad effects are taught. Maybe some people would take the road less traveled and say thanks, but no thanks. Oh, I know there are all kinds of programs that try to teach young people the bad effects of drugs. The last thing most families want to see is their children getting caught up in addiction. But yet it happens everyday. Why? Because of an increasingly permissive society that fights those very programs that try to curb usage by litigating and shredding the laws that were in place to make it harder to do. This self-destructive behavior by judges and politicians defies logic. Every great society that ever existed succumbed to defeat because they could not control the behavior of a few people who wanted to feel good at the expense of everybody.
Look around you this Christmas Eve as you gather with your loved ones. Pick out a face and now imagine that person living in a pile of cardboard behind a dumpster. Think it couldn't happen to you. Think again, or ask an addict.
Mike Holst
Crosslake