One thing that you learn, when older than you ever imagined, is that the company you keep day-to-day around our towns is not always what you understand them to be.
The citizens I lived with in Port Angeles, Sequim and Forks consumed nearly 38,000,000 opioid pills in six years.
Think of it.
They didn’t look strange.
They weren’t rude.
They seemed coherent.
I did not view them as the “others.”
I walked by them and said hello, but I didn’t recognize their troubles.
They did not smell.
Now, someone wants to help.
They are the original people of our towns.
It seems inconvenient for me to have to face now what I never recognized in my fellows.
My perspective is less than one generation.
The original people have been here for countless generations.
They have a keen sense of human frailty.
I think it wise to stand back and let them help.
Some encounter with fear of disruption of my perfect life is deserved for not looking harder at the troubled lives of people I lived with all those years.
Millions of opioid pills came to our little towns.
And we all need help facing the consequences.
Bart Irwin,
Port Angeles