What constitutes a crisis?

Ted and David Gup

Ted Gup writes movingly about the opioid epidemic in the June 23 issue of the Washington Post. He writes that there were approximately 4,000 deaths from drug overdoses in his home state of Ohio. But what makes this all the more painful for Gup is that one of the deaths was his son David. He writes about proposed cuts in federal programs that would reduced the money for dealing with this problem.

Then he says,

As a nation, we seem fixated on the foreign and the sudden, incapable of focusing on what is near and constant. If the drug fatalities were all suffered in a single 9/11-like attack, we would be consumed; the steady seepage of lives scarcely moves us. The failure to address the drug epidemic is not an anomaly but a case study in the shortcomings of human attention and political accounting. From global warming to deteriorating infrastructure, from declining schools to the hollowing out of the middle class, the incremental gets short shrift. It seems beyond our political grasp and communal will.

 Read the entire article here.