One of the tragedies of addiction
The tragedy I want to point out today isn’t on the scale of people losing their futures or their lives, or funding the organizations that supply the cause of the addiction and death, like drug cartels, the Sackler family, McDonald’s, or their peers. (I would bet of the drug cartels, Sackler family, and McDonald’s, McDonald’s and its doof caused the loss of more cumulative years of life than the other two).
The tragedy is when you know someone who is addicted but in denial, lying to you, themselves, and everyone to distract from the addiction others can see, hurting people with these lies, thinking only of themselves and their next hit, doing what they have to to make it happen.
It hurts to see an addict who is someone you care for hurting people and lying to themselves that they aren’t
The tragic situation
Until you see burning fossil fuels as an addiction, what I’m about to say won’t make sense, but seeing people talking about how they’re okay doing something that causes others to suffer for their fleeting pleasure breaks my heart. They put themselves and their supply first and then sacrifice their humanity to keep it up.
I know a couple flying to Cancun for a nearby friend’s birthday party. The friend lives driving distance from their home. The wife in the couple told me something along the lines of, “Josh, I’ve thought about it. I’ve decided I’ll take one flight a year.” Another friend flew to the Caribbean to go fishing with a friend for two days.
With addicts, it’s always what they want. Never the people their actions hurt. It’s like a person in 1800 England, while slavery was legal, drinking rum and molasses from Jamaica saying they’re okay funding plantations. The biggest difference I see between then and now is that today’s problems are much bigger. 9 million people a year die breathing polluted air now. It took the Atlantic slave trade centuries to reach numbers we reach in one year, and our death rate (for only one cause of death resulting from polluting) is increasing.
These people are addicted and lying to keep themselves from seeing it. When you care about a person who feels that because they feel like because they thought their conclusions really hard, it doesn’t count that they’re causing suffering and death, it breaks your heart. It’s tragic to see someone lose their humanity for an addiction.
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