Need To... Gah in Book Six: Trying to Hold On 2019

Bugger!

Yeah, I know I bitched about this earlier. But I had forgotten that Thanksgiving was just LAST WEEK. Like… ONLY 1 WEEK AGO! WHAT?! Don’t you mean like ONE MONTH AGO?!

But… oy. I suppose that is what happens when your week is filled to overflowing with crazies, complaints, law breakers, and meth addicts. Cuz seriously. I say this all the time and all the time it is true:

If we had QUALITY FREE MENTAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL, it wouldn’t solve crime… but it would go a long way towards making the world a better place, a safer place, a more law-abiding place, and a more reasonable place.

If we COULD ELIMINATE METHAMPHETAMINE (and any substances worse than meth if created), it wouldn’t solve crime… but it would go a long way towards making the world a better place, a safer place, a more law-abiding place, and a more reasonable place.

And… here’s the really honest awful and terrible secret that people dance around but don’t openly discuss as it is truly an awful thing to mention::

Do you know some of the reason for “why things were better back in the day?” Expressly because we lived in a place that decided “certain people have less rights for reasons beyond their control.” Yes. That is incredibly fucked up. It is. Think about it. Think about gathering 100 people and randomly giving each of them a demographic stigma. “Everyone wearing blue has mental health issues”; “Everyone wearing green was raised in poverty without access to good education”; “Everyone wearing green AND wearing glasses lives in an area without access to good jobs without a college diploma.”; “Everyone wearing green AND wearing glasses AND has blue eyes has a drug problem”.

But you know what we used to do to the people that had mental health issues back in the day? We’d lock them up, torture them, treat them like subhuman garbage. An awful and cruel thing to do. BUT it meant that “society didn’t have to deal with them.” Same thing for people with drug problems (and for them, we’re still mostly doing that).

But what happened when we decided to stop abusing the mentally ill? Honestly? Nothing. Because nobody stepped up to fill in the gap in a positive way. We’ve got people with massive methamphetamine addictions, people with schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, people with all kinds of mental health maladies… and we said, “These people need help!” (TRUE) and then looked around, waiting for someone to step up and help them. How’s that been going? In Iowa, they shut down hundreds of government programs designed to help. FUCK, Iowa (and many don’t seem to know this) closed the office for Human Trafficking victims! Stating “Human Trafficking isn’t a big enough problem in Iowa to require government funding.” Not to mention the fact that they closed most of our mental health facilities stating “Privately funded places work much better.” Funny story… that might be true… but privately funded places also don’t let everyone in. Especially if they don’t have money or insurance.

So these people cycle through our systems. Eviction to homelessness; homelessness to criminal activity; criminal activity to jail; jail to street.

It is an atrocious thing. I don’t want to treat these people as “individuals less deserving of rights” because they are NOT. But… I’d sure like to figure out some way for them to get help and not be a danger to themselves or others!