Still the best

   Right now the best thing to do is pray for Our Country.  For as much as we stay positive (so many blessings and solutions) this is a challenging environment.  To some extent the big picture's waves hit an end point and the waves are doubling back on us.

  We went through this back in the 1990's when the crack-cocaine had done its damages.  The fentanyl is an epidemic/pandemic and it's deadly and killing a lot of people, but it's not a party atmosphere anywhere in the mountains of T'see and WNC.  Part of what was so hard in the 1990's was that drug-using was really tied into "climbing the ladder" and a rage that was embodied in "cool".  This is hitting us as people have been driven down by Covid changes, as a generation of workers ages into retirement, as disaster kicked our butts, as the economy proved in debt is in debt and that's a prison.

  The key to working through the daily grind or where most people I know have common ground--highways and the few stores left, the streets, and "towns" is actually respecting the space and each other.  And we've got, again, a mix of not able and able; been doing that all along and new to me.  In the day to day world there are always people coming up into next professional growth stage and people having been in that stage and we all tend to forget that people are unique, not robots or automatons.  We all need to respect that everybody's been through life-to-date and what we do at work is work-of-the-day.  Patience helps...nobody can rush to payday or make a sale without making a sale.  We hang in there.  We do the day.

  Right now it's the big money fights.  How many bodies to just jail versus who gets money to "recover" bodies.  And the economy all messed up so it takes a little while to plug bodies into jobs.  Law Enforcement and Military got put in a backburner place as everything got disorderly.  So we have to work together to balance.  Coming back to laws isn't authoritarian.  And it feels really lousy for decent, hardworking, upstanding citizens to be in this hellish stage of suspicion and criminality etc.  It is awful.  But we get through this as a Country.

  What they said on the radio is that it's like the size of two grains of salt, the fentanyl (fen-tan-all) and drug dealers don't bother to measure carefully, two is a "high" and three kills.  Weird drugs.  People who do Fentanyl (straight up? On pot and stuff?) stop breathing; can "OD"; can be resus-itated with nasal spray; but scientifically aren't living-using longer than 18 months on average.  So in addition to the usual diseases from that lifestyle all over "the common ground", we have to be careful about garbage and stuff we touch, and the usual stuff regarding unsafe intoxication--the rest of us driving, the rest of us not stealing, the rest of us...yadda, yadda.

  And not despair.  Pray the people who need help, get help.  Pray we keep stabilizing.  Pray we're not overwhelmed with feeling down.

  I'm praying for our Country.