Where Goeth Community Pride?

Grass doesn't cut itself.

The brush along the sides of the road grows scraggly and into the power lines if the state or the electric company doesn't keep the trees trimmed back.

I am old enough to remember when the state mowed the grass during the growing seasons not just two times, but about every 10 days or so.

I am old enough to remember when the power company actively worked to keep the power lines clear of brush and trees so that if the winds blew hard, we didn't have outages.

I am also old enough to remember when the state planted flowers - yes, flowers! - in the medians so that drivers would have something lovely to look at as they breezed by.

We don't have that anymore. We're lucky now if the grass in the median is trimmed back twice a year. Whatever flowers bloom there are either wildflowers (or weeds imitating wildflowers), or leftovers from a time long past when oodles of daffodils danced merrily in the spring sunshine.

And forget about the power company or the telephone company ensuring that the trees aren't growing up in the power lines. Only brush and scrub trees along the rights of way where the lines run buffer the area between the road and a farm or a lawn these days, though I remember when they used to be kept clear. Neat as a whistle.

At some point, the leaders of the state determined that we needed to not spend tax dollars on ensuring our communities looked nice. Who cares if you can't see to pull out onto the road because the grass has grown so high one must be a giraffe in order to see over it? What's a few deaths compared to a couple of dollars, right? 

This cut jobs, too, which saved more money. Good move, said the leaders. Let's get rid of the fellows who mow, or the teams that clear the rights of way. We won't give the money to the taxpayers, though. We have big friends in the corporations who can use those dollars.

And of course, when other leaders took over, they didn't restore the monetary cuts to what by this time had become a frivolous and useless task, in their minds. 

We went the way of the dollar bill, sniffing along after the ass of the capitalist, watching the tax dollars shift to private companies that were supposed to do things like cut the grass or clear the roads of snow, but didn't do it very well (they failed so badly at the latter that the state has, for the most part, taken that back). Who needs flowers in the median, after all?

I do. You do. We all do. We all need to feel pride in our community, in the area we live in. We need to feel like part of something. Having decent roads and lovely waysides are a part of that. They offer a sense of completeness, a knowledge that someone cares about the area.

Cutting the grass in the median helps make us a caring society, not a bunch of greedy individuals grasping for the biggest grape in the pile of wrath we all are carrying around with us.

Bring back the mowers in the median. (They could be electric tractors so they'll be green and economical, really, they could!) Trim the grass so people can see to pull out of roadways. Have some pride in this state, for heaven's sake.

Virginia should not be bound by overgrowth and tangled weeds.

Let's bring back beauty and civility.

Come on, shake hands. We can do it!

Tyranny

If someone had told me 20 years ago that I'd be having a conversation with a friend in early days of 2022 about what to do when the government breaks down, I'd have dismissed them as ludicrous.

But the government has been collapsing most of my lifetime. I didn't see it because I was living it. I wasn't planning for it because I don't think like that. 

The collapse, though, has been in the works since FDR undertook his policies to give US citizens a social safety net, since he denied big business and the very wealthy, and instead acknowledged that every soul deserves, at the least, a little something near the end of life. He called it Social Security, and the government itself has always called it an "entitlement."

Bill Maher, whom I have mostly stopped watching because he (a) makes fun of obese people and (b) is terribly misogynistic, occasionally has a guest I want to see.

Friday night, he interviewed Timothy Snyder, whose book On Tyranny is not one I've read, but one I've read much about.

It was an interview that should have been highly noted. But even Maher himself apparently barely registered it, because I never saw it cross my twitter feed, while another guest's comments about being "over" Covid and the protocols in place for public safety, did.

Here is the interview. It's worth listening to all 10 minutes of it.

They discuss a "business crash" in 2024-2025 (long about 2:53 in the interview). That's concerning. We're already having supply shortages and inflation. What will a "business crash" look like?

"If we stay in this cocoon of The Big Lie," says Snyder, "we're not going to have a country in a few years down the line." (He's talking about the former guy's continual pounding away that Biden is an illegitimate president, and that the former guy had the election stolen from him. The former guy lost. It went through the court system. That should have been the end of it. He attempted a coup.)

This stuff scares me. Why doesn't it scare everyone? There are, apparently, a minority of very loud and powerful people who want the United States of America to fail as a nation. They apparently believe they will have all the power - they will have the guns; they will be able to live like the assholes in that show Yellowstone (which I've only seen a few episodes of, and I don't plan to watch more). They will be able to make their own reality and if my reality interferes with theirs, they will, quite plainly, kill me and get me out of the way.

Snyder goes on to say that he thinks in the weeks between the election of 2024 and the inauguration of 2025, if the former guy runs for office and loses yet still wins because of the changes Republican states have made to election laws, then we will have a major crisis. "The country can break down," he says in the interview above. "I imagine Americans in blue states going to red states and American in red states going to blue states, worrying about what's going to come next."

Americans may have to run to places where they feel safer. "The majority of Americans think we're heading for some kind of collapse," Snyder says.

Other countries have noticed. Canada is preparing for our collapse. "By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence," [political scientist Thomas] Homer-Dixon writes. "By 2030, if not sooner," he adds, "the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship."

A 2014 study [note the date - 8 years ago] by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page concluded, in essence, that the United States is now an oligarchy. Specifically, the authors found that “A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45 percent of the time.” They also found that “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose.”

Persistent, dramatic and growing disparities between voter preferences and government policy are radically unsustainable. Sooner or later, a social explosion is liable to occur. In a nation drowning in guns, a mass rebellion against a government beholden to the billionaire class could prove particularly violent and destructive. (Here's the link for this article.)

If other countries are seeing this, what are we seeing from the inside? We're seeing neighbor pitted against neighbor - over masks, for one thing. But is it really masks? No, some consider it control. (It's not control that people have to wear pants or otherwise cover their butt, I note, and I suspect if we'd grown up wearing masks during flu season, no one would be complaining. It's the newness of this that some object to. Change.)

Then there are mass shootings, supply chain issues, climate change, lack of health care, low wages, etc. etc. We may be number one in arms, but when compared to other countries, we are low on the stats when it comes to taking care of one another.

I don't have any answers to what I see as the demise of this nation. I'm just one useless old woman with a little bitty blog that few people read.

I'm probably one of the first people that some people around me would kill off. Useless old women don't stand a chance in the coming days, whether those days are in 2025 or 2030. Nor would it matter what "side" I might be on. There are already so many sides that we're all the enemy of someone, whether we know it or not.

Scary things to think about. Sobering things to think about. And it's not hyperbole to think like this. The signs are everywhere. The stories are no longer confined to fictional books about government overreach, espionage, and overthrowing those in power. We're living these stories now, daily.

And there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

Spread a Little Sunshine

This week is known as Sunshine Week in the journalism world. It's when newspapers and other media spread light on open government. Without open government, we have no democracy.

One of the best tools for folks who are interested in what their government is doing, whether federal, state, or locally, is the Freedom of Information Act.

Known as FOIA, this varies from state to state and the federal government also has its own rules. The federal government's rules are not very good - they can, if they want, take years to respond to a FOIA request. Follow the link here for a FAQ about federal FOIA laws. The website describes FOIA as "the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government." If you're interested in what the federal government is doing and can't find the information you seek on various agency websites, you may need to file a FOIA request to get your answer.

Virginia, the state where I live, has a FOIA law that is a bit stricter than the governments. For one thing, localities and state agencies have to respond within a given amount of time. Virginia has a Freedom of Information Advisory Council that citizens and government employees can use when questions arise. The state's Freedom of Information Act is also posted on this website, in its entirety.

As a long-time news writer, I have had to utilize FOIA on a few occasions. Mostly I have had to invoke it to force local governments to stop meeting in secret. Your local town council or Board of Supervisors or whatever it is called in your locality can only meet in "closed session" for certain things. If they talk about other things during these closed sessions, they are in violation of the Freedom of Information Act, and if someone takes them to court about it, they can be fined for talking about things behind closed doors. I've never taken a locality to court but I have threatened to do so a time or two.

Since I have long been a fan of open information, I find closed doors and secret meetings especially loathsome. In my opinion, governments discuss many things behind closed doors that could be addressed publicly with a little forethought and imagination. For example, it is okay to talk in closed session about a company wanting to buy property and move to the community. In my opinion, this only needs to be discussed once in closed session. After that, they should designate the company as "Project X" and the location, if it must be withheld for whatever reason, could be called "Location Y" and then afterwards, in open session, they can discuss Project X at Location Y in public. But most localities do not do this. Actually I've never seen a single one of the many I have covered do this, but hopefully it happens somewhere.

I have also used FOIA to request information about something the government was doing. Sometimes as a reporter one simply acquires a "gut" feeling that something is amiss, and occasionally one needs to ask for supporting documents. For the first 20 years of my career, I did not have to resort to FOIA requests because I had a good relationship with county administrators, town managers, town council members, and supervisors. Some of them did not like me but they could not fault my reporting. I was what now would be referred to as an old-school news writer. I kept my opinions to myself and simply wrote the facts about what happened. I explained things as best I could so that the public could understand what was happening with their tax dollars. I considered it an honor to educate and inform and I wasn't there to make my own opinions known.

This openness with elected officials and public employees changed when President George W Bush took office, especially with federal agencies. Where I once could go talk to forest service people and obtain information and stories, I suddenly found I had to go through an information officer. This wall crept into local governments soon thereafter, so that many communities now have an (unnecessary) information person that the news media must go through. No longer can they get the information directly from the person the people actually elected, or the county administrator the people are paying for. I have heard many reasons for this - to keep county officials from being bothered, or to keep them safe, or whatever - but mostly it is to keep people from knowing what is happening and to ensure the government gets its own "spin" on the issue. 

I wonder, if the person you elect isn't willing to talk to you, then why would you vote for that person again?

After 35 years of watching various government entities, I have found that elected officials frequently forget they are elected, until it's time to be re-elected. They have their pet projects and the things they want to accomplish, and they don't want the citizens to know what they are doing because they know someone will object. Objections can become loud, noisy, boisterous, and stressful, so doing things in secret makes sense if you aren't into democracy. Democracy is loud, noisy, boisterous, and stressful, when it is successful.

Most citizens pay little attention to their local government, and this is where they need to pay attention the most, because this affects them greatly. Newspaper coverage has declined significantly in recent years and many local community papers have folded, or have been bought up by larger conglomerates. These larger companies then fire the seasoned reporter to replace him or her with someone not long out of school who has no historical community knowledge and no understanding of what is actually going on around them. If the reporter lasts three years then that person will be a seasoned and valuable member who can contribute. However, in this day and age I don't think many reporters last that long. When old reporters leave newspapers, or when newspapers die, the community no longer knows what its local representatives are doing. They don't know if their tax dollars are being spent wisely or foolishly.

This is giving rise to "community journalists" - or people like myself who once were journalists who attend meetings and who then sound the alarm wherever they can when things look weird or off or iffy.

It is up to us, the electorate, to watch what our elected officials are doing. Go spread a little sunshine and attend a school board meeting or a town council meeting.

You may be surprised at what you learn.

Can't We Look At the Big Picture?

The front page of the Virginia Department of Health's web page says:

OPIOID ADDICTION IN VIRGINIA

Learn More

You can find information there about how this issue has been declared a public health crisis (November 2016). New rules are in place that now keep primary care physicians from managing their patients' chronic pain and instead they will have to send them to a pain specialist.

I feel for anyone who loses a loved one for any reason. But opioids are not the only reason people die. People die from gun shots, too. More people die from gunshots, actually, than from opioid overdose.

Many stories I am reading indicate that people with chronic pain issues are being caught up in this government effort to crack down on opioid drug use. However, from what I have read much of the problem is coming from heroin addicts and people using synthetic opioids brought illegally into the state, not people who are receiving prescription medication from their doctors.

Apparently the government is not making this distinction even though their own reports indicate this to be so:

“As we see the nature of drug addiction shift, from prescription opioids to heroin and synthetic fentanyl, we must be vigilant and ready to respond quickly,” said Secretary of Health and Human Resources Dr. Bill Hazel in a news release from the Virginia Governor's Office.

Even the White House thinks the problem is not with prescription drugs - "In a Wednesday press briefing . . . the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, blamed the crisis on "cheap heroin" flooding the market . . ."

So the opioid drug addiction and overdose problem is really . . . what? Prescription drugs or not?

This article from the People's Pharmacy explains how chronic pain sufferers have been caught up in this opioid crack down. "Many patients suffering long-term severe pain are having a hard time getting relief. We have heard from hundreds of people who never abused opioids or increased their dose," The Peoples' Pharmacy writes. The article then lists numerous stories from folks who feel they are now suffering because the actions of others have made it harder for them to receive the medication they need to live a better life.

Here is a chart from the Virginia Department of Health on Opioid Deaths. According to this information, 801 people died in the state in 2015 from opioid overdose.

Here is a chart that lists the number of gun deaths in the state of Virginia, current as of 2014. According to this information, there were 889 gun deaths here compared to 733 opioid deaths that same year.

As you can see, more people die from gun shot wounds than from overdosing on opioids.

However, there is little discussion (practically nothing) on the Virginia Department of Health's website about guns at all.

In fact, in their list of "health concerns" from A-Z, there isn't a mention of firearm safety or guns.

There is stuff on nuclear power plant accidents, fish consumption, and radon. I wonder how much any of us worries about nuclear power plant accidents. I know they don't cross my mind at all.

In the search box, I finally pulled up a .pdf on firearms, apparently last updated 11/10.

It says this on the .pdf -

I don't know if overdose and poisonings are the same thing in the eyes of the VDH.

Here's the whole .pdf, which I snagged as .jpg before it disappears -

I know there is a second amendment argument in the U.S. Constitution about gun right ownership, but I don't see how we can look at one thing that kills people when a similar amount of people - more, even - are dying from something else.

Isn't that like pointing to a pigeon while denying that blue jays exist?

Personally, I do not know anyone who has died from an opioid overdose, or at least I am not aware of it. My husband who is in emergency services sees it and he says overdoses do seem to be occurring more frequently but he says it is due to heroin, not prescription pain killers. Perhaps if there was not a drug available to "bring back" those who overdose, the number of deaths would be significantly higher.
 
But his squads also run many gunshot wound calls, most of which never make the news. Those folks are also saved by medical intervention, so feasibly gun death numbers would be higher, too, if our medical heroes didn't have so much expertise at fixing up holes in people.

While I know no overdose victims, I know people who have been affected by gun violence. My friend's son was dating one of the victims killed at Virginia Tech in April 2007. He was shaken to the core. One of my husband's firefighters, long ago, killed himself - he was a nice guy and his wife and I had a lot in common. That shook me to the core.

A very long time ago, one of my father's friends accidentally shot himself in the leg during a poker game. I had nightmares about it for years. I sometimes still do.

About 18 months ago, I was watching TV when two local news reporters were shot live on the air. I am friends with some of the staff of that TV station, and they will never be the same. I'm not sure I will be, either. As a print news reporter myself, it certainly has left me thinking twice about whether or not I want to be out in the public, open and available, a target to anyone.

Why are we emphasizing one cause of death and ignoring another? Shouldn't we try to combat all of them in some fashion (including vehicle deaths, which I know someone will bring up, and heart attacks, etc.) 

Let's follow the money to see who gains from this particular war on drugs, because in the USA it's always about the money. Pharmaceutical companies. Here's an article dated 3/29/17 that says Big Pharma is really behind this problem, the result of a concentrated marketing program.

An article in the same publication notes that the remedy to an overdose, introduced in 2002, "has generated $1-2 billion a year in revenues, first for its initial British manufacturer, Reckitt Benckiser, and the Richmond, Virginia-based company that it spun off two years ago, Indivior."

That sounds like a good reason to sell one drug so you can sell another drug to fix the first drug, doesn't it? Billions of dollars.

The article also claims the remedy is as addictive as the drug it is saving the person from. So more sales.

The pain doctors will have more patients. They are specialists so many patients' co-pays for insurance will increase. (In my case, my co-pay would increase from $30 to see my primary care physician to $50 to see a specialist of any kind, as an example.)

Fighting drug wars in America has always been a losing proposition. From LSD to marijuana to cocaine, efforts to remove drugs from communities have only enriched drug smugglers and criminal organizations.

Wars on drugs don't work.

With Republicans in control of the federal government and many states, gun laws are off the table. The Republicans don't even mind if you're mentally ill and you own a gun.

These are not separate issues. These are one and the same. Both of these issues are about people dying and they are about money. Neither is about your right to live or my right to live, because the people who make the rules really don't give a crap about that.

They just care about their big donors, and unless your name is Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, that isn't you.

We already have gun laws. You can't legally own an automatic rifle, or a Sherman tank. You can't legally own a rocket launcher. I don't want you to not have a gun if you want one. I am a crackerjack shot with a .22 rifle.

But stiffer background checks might save a life, just as making it hard for Grandma to get her pain killers might save a life. So why is Grandma suffering while Joe Gunslinger isn't even having to wait more than 20 minutes to pick up his new firearm?

I could not find a chart that compared opioid overdoses to firearms for Virginia. I did find one for Colorado that I want to share with you. It is from the Colorado Department of Health (apparently they do keep track of gun deaths there.)

 

 

Personally, I think this chart really says all that needs to be said. We're chasing after farts and rainbows, people.

 

Somebody, please, stop and think about what is really going on here. FOLLOW THE MONEY. And always remember that your life really doesn't matter to anyone but you, no matter how smooth the huckster talks. Your life sure as hell doesn't matter to anybody in Washington DC or to anyone who runs a drug company. They just want whatever money you have left.

 

This issue matters to me. It is personal. I know people who are affected by this new "war on drug" episode. They are hurting and will hurt more.

 

Maybe the government is hoping grandmas and grandpas will shoot themselves when the pain becomes more than they can stand.