Tag Archives: mental health care reform

Troubled People on the Interurban Trail

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Broken minds are everywhere, invisible

Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Would have been an extremely different and horrifying world if Nazi Germany and its Axis Empires had won the Second World War – and they very nearly did. Thoughts of our history with changing attitudes toward duty and sacrificed blazed around inside my mind. Went to hike the Shoreline section of the regional Interurban Trail system. Brisk walk with a daypack up to Trader Joe’s and back home to my apartment complex. Part of regaining my health so I could backpack in the mountains once again, thruhiking the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood in Oregon at the end of July weighs on my mind, so first had to walk swiftly on the flats without passing out. Off I go. Soon passed a homeless White man in pink clothes wearing white, puffy booties as he sat in the sun enjoying the late spring weather. He focused on using his hands to crank or turn parts on what looked like a small wood and leather puzzle box about the size of a softball. 

Later passed a well-dressed, young Black man, looked like a college student with a beige V-necked sweater on, as he stomped from the Shoreline Trader Joe’s over to the trail while hollering about God. His daypack burst with clothes and books. The man’s voice is really loud, his arms and legs jerk with agitation, and he lets the whole world know he is “angry!” When he looked over and saw me trotting along with my one trekking pole, he shouted, “By the Almighty God, by His Holy name, I’m gonna kill you for having that stick!” Continue reading →

Guns in America: Paralysis, Polarization, & Do-Nothingism

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Yes, address mental health care, and, yes, more importantly,
Amend the Second Amendment

The numbers make mass shootings in America look like war. Certainly feels like a war. Per the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 214 mass shootings in the United States of America with over 17,300 deaths by guns from New Year’s Day to the end of May 2022. There were 42 recognized mass shootings in the first 23 days of the month of May, then several more, then another 14 over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. This warfare seems bookended by the predatory, hate-filled slaughter of Black people grocery shopping in Buffalo, New York, and the equally hateful, psychopathic hunting down of little kids and their teachers to shoot and kill in Uvalde, Texas.

Those on the Left bellow, “Do something!” Those on the Right shout, “Do nothing!” The outrage, deflections, and self-righteous demonization boils over and continues to divide us further from doing the “something” the majority of Americans demand. Most of those in the moderate middle feel “sick and tired” of grocery stores, houses of worship, restaurants, city streets, schools, more schools, and yet still more schools getting shot up and say, “Enough is enough!”

Even the “commonsense” gun control reforms people want enacted at a federal level including strict background checks for all purchases, tighter regulation of and even banning of certain military-style firearms and types of magazines will only go so far.

We often experience the rigidity of political extremists on both sides. We see, read, and hear their demonization of each other and everyone else with the quest for opposing utopias between the libertarian right and the socialist left drowning out the voices of our vast pragmatic middle. “Mental health issues” is a term bandied about without serious action steps taken to address them.

What to do? The solution is to go to the source of the controversy, the wording of our Second Constitutional Amendment, and reform it. This shall override the ineffective crazy quilt patchwork of conflicting state and local regulations or lack thereof. It’s simple. We do what’s hard. We do what’s hard first! Continue reading →