Extra Voices, Sept. 20, 2017
The local heroin crisis, and revisiting the great monument debate
Frederick County’s deaths of despair
By Karl Bickel
Deaths of despair is a phenomena seen primarily in the economically depressed parts of our country where the American dream has left the working class behind. But communities that seem relatively vibrant economically, a county like Frederick, can suffer from what appear to be an increasing number of deaths of despair as well.
Deaths of despair are characterized by drug overdose deaths, deaths resulting from suicide and alcohol related deaths. A uniquely American phenomenon that effects mostly white Americans with a high school education or less, it was first observed in 2015.
The white working class is suffering disproportionately from these deaths of despair. The growth in the nation’s economy has over the last two decades significantly advantaged our population’s upper income brackets particularly the upper ten percent. Wealth has been radically redistributed upward leaving the working class Americans behind.
Rust belt states like Ohio where good well-paying manufacturing jobs have disappeared and states like West Virginia where coal mining was once king, have seen an epidemic of deaths of despair. Given the current economic picture and bleak prognosis for the future in those communities it is understandable that you would see a rise in drug and alcohol abuse, even suicide.
But what is it that is driving an unprecedented increase in drug overdose deaths and alcohol related deaths in our County where we are experiencing low rates of unemployment and relatively positive growth; and what are we doing about it?
According to the most recent report available from Maryland’s State Department of Health, The trend in Frederick County should raise concerns. While the suicide trend line is alarming and somewhat erratic as it jumps around a bit, the trajectory remains somewhat stable over time. On the other hand, the trend line for drug overdose and alcohol related deaths is on a relatively steady upward trajectory.
We know the opioid epidemic that is sweeping the country has hit Frederick County and hit it hard, harder than many other communities. Although the alcohol related deaths are not getting the attention the opioid crisis is and the deaths are significantly fewer, the trend is alarming. From 2012 to 2013 the number of alcohol related deaths doubled and the numbers have continued to increase annually climbing in 2016 to triple the number seen in 2012.
Alcohol abuse remains the most abused substance in Frederick County and deaths related to alcohol abuse are on an upward trajectory.
We need leadership to address the opioid epidemic. That has become abundantly clear. We need leadership that will not ignore the growing problem of alcohol related deaths the way the growing opioid epidemic was ignored for years in our community, leadership that has been conspicuously absent up to this point.
The opioid epidemic had been growing for a decade or more before it was acknowledged in our community. Alarm bells had been sounding, particularly in the law enforcement community, but sounding on deaf ears of our county’s law enforcement leaders. We must not let the same indifference occur regarding alcohol abuse.
The third pillar of deaths of despair, suicide, has been erratic with the numbers rising and falling alternately over the years. After a decline in 2014, 2015 has shown a slight increase.
This all begs the question, what is going on in our county that is producing an increase in deaths of despair? What is being done about it? Who is taking the lead in trying to identify the root cause and preventing future deaths of despair?
We have seen nearly 350 drug and alcohol related deaths in Frederick County since 2007, most of which have been opioid related. Yet we have no strategy, no collaborative plan, no specific goals or objectives, simply put no leadership.
Many have begun to respond, numerous individuals and countless groups. Though much good is being done, many efforts are currently taking place in silos, lacking coordination, and are not achieving their full potential in saving lives, reducing addiction and preventing alcohol and opioid abuse.
There is no shortage of dedicated people in our community eager to help eradicate alcohol abuse and opioid addiction, volunteers, police personnel, social service agencies, non-governmental organizations and fire-rescue personnel to name a few. What is lacking is leadership and a strategy.
We need leadership that is accountable for results in battling the opioid epidemic in our county and that will not ignore the growing problem of alcohol abuse. That leadership must develop a comprehensive strategy with a plan outlining specific measurable objectives. A taskforce made up of a broad range of stakeholders needs to craft a plan that uses real-time data to guide their actions.
Weekly task force meetings should evaluate measured progress in reaching milestones, make adjustments to tactics, assign specific tasks to stakeholder groups and report progress to the community at large.
Under the aforementioned approach, based on a strategic plan and with sound leadership, our community can take on the challenge of reducing the number of deaths of despair saving countless lives and preventing the heartache it brings to family and friends.
Karl Bickel has been published in the Baltimore Sun, The Frederick News-Post and many other venues as well as being quoted in USA Today, Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The Washington Examiner and many more. He can be reached at KarlBickel@comcast.net
Selective History
By Guy Fletcher
People who know me and know my interest in the Civil War have been asking me for weeks what I think about the Confederate statues. I have had no problem talking about the issue, but I have been reluctant to write too much about it because there is almost zero civil discourse about the matter.
But I have seen so much misinformation and outright historical ignorance in the past few weeks that I feel I need to make my position clear, even if it pisses many people off.
First of all, understand that I love history. I love reading about history, visiting historical sites and then reading about those sites again. It’s an illness handed down to me by my father, and one of my great regrets is that he didn’t live longer so we could have spent many days visiting battlefields and museums together. Earlier this month, just two days before the protests started in Charlottesville, I toured the battlefield at Antietam for hours and I thought about how much my dad would have enjoyed being there that afternoon.
Like some other history buffs, I used to believe that Confederate Civil War statues served an important, if uncomfortable, purpose in framing the history of our country. I thought they could be useful as vivid reminders that people once glorified waging a war in defense of less-than-honorable causes like slavery.
That hasn’t happened. The people who have always hated the statues still want them gone. And now we see that some of the people who support keeping the statues are using them to leverage hate. Whatever useful context the statues could provide is ignored.
It’s time for most of the statues to go.
“But,” you say, “what about history?”
Nearly all of the Confederate statues that exist today were not built immediately after the war by grieving citizens understandably wishing to honor their recently fallen countrymen. The Confederate statues were built many decades later, mainly in the early 20th century. The statue in Charlottesville at the center of protests earlier this month was built nearly 60 years after the war. The Robert E. Lee/Stonewall Jackson statue in Baltimore torn down just after the Charlottesville protests was built closer to the present day than when the Civil War was actually fought. So much for history.
But more telling than when the statues were built is why they were built. They weren’t put there to teach history but rather to advertise a growing southern pride/white supremacy movement of that era (the same period of heightened racism that gave us the movie “The Birth of a Nation” and the second generation of the Ku Klux Klan). In fact, today’s white nationalists are using the statues for exactly the purpose they were intended for by the people who built them--as copper-plated propaganda promoting an idealized way of life, not as an accurate historical portrayal of the war and its participants.
It’s interesting that so many defenders of the Confederate statues say tearing them down is an attempt to erase, ignore or whitewash history. That’s actually why the statues were built. They were put there to promote a sanitized story that romanticizes the South’s “Lost Cause” and hide an uglier truth of death, human trafficking, sexual abuse and, of course, slavery. That’s why we now have all these statues of brave men on horseback, pointing to the horizon with determined stares; it covers up the dirtier reality. Welcome to Whitewashing History, 101.
When I was at the battlefield at Antietam, I noticed the statue of Lee along Md. 34. The statue is relatively new, less than 20 years old, and to my untrained artistic eye, impressive. But what made me notice the statue was its perch on land occupied by Union soldiers during the Battle of Antietam, an entire mile from Lee’s actual headquarters. It also shows Lee sitting atop his horse, Traveller, which is curious because historians believe Lee’s wrists were injured in September 1862 and he needed to move about the battle in an ambulance. But because Lee in an ambulance would make a crappy statue, we get a whitewashed version of a gallant general impossibly on horseback in the wrong part of the battlefield.
The Lee/Jackson statue in Baltimore has always struck me as odd because Maryland, despite its many Southern sympathizers, never seceded from the Union and neither Lee nor Jackson fought in or near the city during the war. Fake news! Defenders of the statues like to say Lee and Jackson were great Americans and that’s why they were so honored in a Union city. We really honor “great Americans” who committed treason, in defense of a nation that sanctioned human trafficking? More whitewashing.
But more importantly, what about the Confederate statues you don’t see?
Lee’s top lieutenant during most of the war was Gen. James Longstreet, a Georgian who is considered by many military historians to be the finest corps commander on either side of the conflict. But where are all the Longstreet statues? (There is only one that I know of, tucked in a stand of trees at Gettysburg.) Longstreet is AWOL in the South, his likeness even left off Stone Mountain—the Confederacy’s “Mt. Rushmore”—in his home state.
Why is Longstreet persona non granite? It’s probably because he had the audacity to (correctly) second-guess Lee’s wartime performance, convert to the Republican Party and support his old friend Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for president. That kind of free thinking didn’t fit with the Lost Cause narrative promoted in early 20th century, so Longstreet, despite his enormous contributions to the Confederacy, didn’t get the Lee/Jackson statue treatment. His omission from courthouses and town squares is probably the most damning evidence there is for the real reason Confederate statues were built.
And where are the statues of Lee forcing captured free black men into slavery, surrendering at Appomattox, refusing to include black soldiers in prisoner exchanges or committing military malpractice by ordering the infamous Pickett’s Charge that resulted in thousands of needless casualties at Gettysburg? If you swap those images with some of the monochromatic, heroic statues we have now, maybe then we would have an accurate portrait of the Confederate leaders and the war they waged.
I’m not saying all of the statues need to come down. I think each need to be looked at for historic value, accuracy and context; the ones on battlefields and cemeteries are probably the most appropriate to stay. But most of the rest have to moved, probably to museums where their intent can be better explained and understood.
It’s not about political correctness, but about historical correctness.
Stop Naming and Statue Making
By Chuck Hough
How about we as a culture knock this stupid naming and statue making off all together? Stop making statues of people, living or dead. Stop naming things and places after people, living or dead. Stop crafting and erecting monuments to people, living or dead. Stop naming bridges, sports arenas, mountains, naval ships, tall buildings, airports, tunnels, streets, parks, outhouses…whatever…after people, living or dead. This notion of naming things after some person who did something that made them famous or at the very least was well-known during THEIR time is ridiculous to me. One reason is that, in my opinion, NO ONE truly deserves to be memorialized in perpetuity over any other person. Another reason is it’s not terribly difficult to find some messed up crap in a person’s past that isn’t on par with current cultural norms, ethics, and morals. Everyone has acted in some way they really should not be proud. Everyone has said something that probably should have been kept to themselves. People are flawed. Some more than others. There are tons of things named after people who, years after they have died and their existence is a mere footnote in history, it is revealed had some major assholishness about them. Name a thing or place or monument named after some person and, with some research, you can find something about them that isn’t or wasn’t cool. For example: “Woodrow Wilson Bridge” in DC and numerous college buildings and schools. All named after a President who racially segregated the civil service, purging African-American employees from the federal government. Wilson also vocally and actively advocated for compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded, mentally ill, and criminals. Liverpool's Penny Lane, made famous by the Beatles commemorates James Penny, an 18th Century slave trader. There are around 50 statues and monuments globally honoring Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi was a misogynist who wrote loathingly of women, yet slept naked and bathed with his own teenaged nieces and other young women. There’s isn’t a building or road in any town or city in West Virginia that doesn’t have the late Senator from West Virginia, filibusterer of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and former “Imperial Kleagle” of the KKK, Robert C Byrd’s name on it. The number of things named for John F. Kennedy both in the U.S. and abroad is astounding. Not only was JFK a womanizer who had multiple affairs as a senator and while serving as president, the Kennedy family made their fortune as bootleggers, smugglers and gun runners. I would much rather see things and places named after concepts, ideas, wondrous events, or things worthy of reverence. We need more stuff named for “liberty”, “friendship”, “family”, “freedom”, “peace”, “brotherhood”, “sisterhood” and the like. These things are universal and hold more meaning and importance than any one person can muster.
