Traveling through parts of Tennessee and Kentucky that are covered white with a winter coat this week I have seen close to a hundred whitetail deer. There wasn’t an overnight population explosion of this normally elusive forest dweller; it’s just the combination of additional foraging made necessary by the cold and degradation of their natural camouflage due to the snow makes them easier to spot. Now they seem to be everywhere. They are always there though, we just don’t see them… and yes, I am going to make this about drugs and alcohol.
In the forest of societal maladies including homelessness, truancy, infidelity, neglect, abuse, crime, incarceration, bankruptcy, disease, and distress there slinks another evasive creature- addiction. We have conditioned ourselves not to see the underlying problem, not to blame the drugs and alcohol that permeate our lives. I wish there was a way to block out all of these problems, just white them out. If we dealt with the drug and alcohol abuse that plagues this nation first, all the rest of the problems would become so much more manageable.
