Seeing past the addiction

To the editor,

 To say that the people of the service industry living in and around Durango are a crazy, dysfunctional, loving, happy, sad, mad, insane family seems a monumental understatement.

Many of us do not have local family, and we have paralleled that displaced love or suppressed energy into one another. We see each other nearly every day and have been with one another through some of our own live’s highest highs and lowest lows. We have cried, laughed, traveled, loved, partied and danced through some of life’s many well distributed trials and tribulations, some self-induced others sadly handed to us. We serve and smile through it all, knowing that at the end of the day we will somehow find one another and vent and push through knowing we will be together again and again.

We recently lost a member of our family, and it has hurt and devastated so many. Not only due to the way he died but the fact that we all tried to love him enough to make it a better world for him in which he would not so desperately crave the escape that his drug of choice offered. He is not the first to have left this family of friends, and I am sure he will not be the last. But, his kind spirit and handsome sideways smile will live on as I walk down Main Avenue searching for him and his wonderfully expressive eyes. He was with me through some of my toughest times, effortlessly and without question jumping into the trenches of my darkness and never thought any less or different of me.

How someone can be so kind and giving yet so lost to an addiction is something I had not been able to comprehend until moving back to Durango a year and a half ago. I have been of the mindset that only selfish, weak people become addicted, but I have sadly traveled the spectrum through love and loss within my community of friends, lovers and neighbors to realize that my big-headed judgmental bullshit is about as far from the truth as can be.

I have been lucky enough to have loved and been loved by them and now accept that they are far from the  weak humans I so idealistically labeled them; nor are they selfish, some of them being the most giving souls I have encountered. They are not the lost souls of the stories we have heard, they are people living in the now. They are the friends, lovers, roommates, neighbors and parents that we love and play integral parts in our own life stories.

The people in our worlds are all here for a reason, and pushing addicted friends away to save the pain in our hearts in the off chance they may one day leave this world is not the answer. I thought distancing myself from the experience would lessen the pain I would feel if he left this world, but it did not. Having boundaries and not enabling is a doable feat while loving them. We cannot change anyone, we can only change ourselves. We should love them and persevere through our fears of loss to love them and care for them in spite of their addictions. See them for who they are and are not, and love them despite their flaws. Know that they are doing the best they can with the tools they have. Do your best to see through their addictions to live for a moment in their spectrum of love. The void in our hearts when they depart is permanent, and only time will reduce the pain that echoes through the hole they leave.

They live a life I cannot always understand, much less explain, but I find their “in the moment” abilities admirable and wish within my sometimes-sober mind, I could live this mantra. My friend was not a number or a statistic or an addict, he was a big-hearted, compassionate and gentle soul who will be missed dearly.

– Jennifer Murphy,  Durango

Burning for Bernie in 2016

To the editor,

Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” He might have been talking about Bernie Sanders’ run for president. Bernie has attracted massive crowds, much more than any other candidates. In a straw poll at the Wisconsin state Democratic Party convention, Clinton got 49 percent and Sanders got 41 percent. The corporate media dismisses him because he is a democratic socialist, but his positions are shared by strong majorities of Americans, as Juan Cole has pointed out. Yes, he is a “radical” but in the original sense of the word (“going to the root of society’s problems.”)

He is the only major party candidate to come out for free college tuition, a ban on fracking, single payer Medicare for all, a $5.5 billion proposal to employ 1 million young people and a bill to support co-ops and worker-owned businesses. He is a leading opponent of the Trans Pacific Partnership. He supports legislation to make it easier to join a union. He supports paid family leave, pay equity and genuine progressive tax reform.

As Bernie says, “We must stand up and fight back. We must launch a political revolution that engages millions of Americans from all walks of life in the struggle for real change. This country belongs to all of us, not just the billionaire class.”

Vote in the Democratic Party caucuses for Bernie in March. If you aren’t registered as a Dem, please do it as soon as possible. Hey! Sometimes long shots win!

– Dave Anderson, Boulder

To hell in a toxic hand basket

To the editor,

Residue from Agent Orange was not removed from military aircraft after the end of the Vietnam War, which sprayed millions of gallons of this herbicide from 1955-72. Now, barely alive vets who flew or worked on Fairchild C-123 aircrafts up until 1982 (that’s 10 years after this war without proper residue elimination) will be compensated for this deadly exposure.

The lists of failing our troops from all of the wars past and present have not, for some insane reason, kept us from slowly but surely taking on Iraq once again. What else is insane is that the millions of gallons of leftover Agent Orange, made by Dow Chemical, were recently allowed to join Round-Up, made by worldwide seed controller Monsanto, to spray crops with EPA and USDA approval.

For many years, I have sent endless postcards with legitimate concerns to reps that are supposed to react. Yes, postcards, because correspondence in envelopes, starting in 2002, from white/blue-collared/poor citizens are not opened and immediately destroyed in Washington, D.C. There is power in numbers, so please take the time to send off cards to D.C. and stand up for your concerns, or we will continue this rocky journey of going to Hell in a hand basket.

– Sally Florence,  Durango

Seeing the forest for the trees

(The following is an open letter to U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., from Rep. J. Paul Brown, R-Ignacio.)

Senator Bennet:

There are places in my House District where over 90 percent of the trees on federal land are dead. This has created the potential for a fire crisis of the magnitude that we have never seen. If we have a fire under present conditions, every tree will be destroyed.

If we act now to remove the dead trees, at least along visual corridors, the young trees that have survived will continue to live, and a complete denuding of the landscape will be avoided. What is needed is a Presidential executive order that will allow lumber companies to harvest the dead trees. We do not have time to waste.

We cannot wait to go through the years of federal bureaucratic red tape to get this done! We must take action now.

– Sincerely, J. Paul Brown, State Representative HD 59