Synaptic Silence

The proposal to place a measure declaring Columbia County an Illegal Worker Free Zone on an upcoming ballot has already prompted strong emotional reactions, pro and con. I do not doubt that the people who support this proposal do so out of a sincere conviction that such a measure is necessary to address what they view as an important legal and social issue—the strict enforcement of existing immigration laws as a means to provide protection to citizens and other persons legally residing and working in this country.

Those of us who stand on the other side of the immigration issue, however, have equally sincere convictions. A conviction that every human being has value and the right to be treated with respect and dignity. A conviction that a codified policy of exclusion and alienation is the first step backwards to the racist policies of our recent past. A conviction that complex issues are rarely successfully addressed by seemingly simple solutions. And a conviction that a focus on the higher moral context of any issue provides the best framework for solving the truly serious problems that we all face in an increasingly confusing world.

The opinions about immigration that have already been voiced in meetings and in the media would appear to indicate there is no middle ground on this issue. But there is a higher moral question underlying this issue that confronts all of us, not just as citizens, but as human beings and keepers of this planet. How do we go about making this county, this country, and our world a place where every individual can pursue what our Founders identified as inalienable rights endowed by the Creator—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

That is the context in which we should examine every issue that confronts us. And I believe the right path can be found by answering the following questions. Do we become a nation of fear? Or do we remain a nation of hope, not just for us, but for all the people in the world?.

If we choose fear, we will continue to build defensive walls, virtual and physical, ever higher in an attempt to remain unaffected by the real and imagined terrors outside our gates. Except that one day, when our fear is greatest, we will convince ourselves we have no need for gates at all. And at that moment, our zone of perceived safety will be transformed instantly into a self-imposed prison of the like-minded.

If we choose hope, we must realize that true freedom requires the acceptance of continuing challenges as our society transforms itself into successive new identities. We must accept that change and permeability to new ideas and cultural influences are the keys to keeping this nation replenished and alive. And we must admit to ourselves that freedom becomes a meaningless word the first time we deny it to someone else who craves it as much or more than we do.

I choose hope.

Two years ago, I authored an editorial in the Oregonian citing the courage of Senator Gordon Smith for speaking openly about his son’s suicide and highlighting the serious problems facing the mentally ill.  As a mental health investigator who works daily with the most seriously mentally ill in our society, I was deeply moved by his willingness to take a public stand for something terribly painful and difficult for him and his family.

I’m writing now to challenge our state and federal legislators to be equally courageous in confronting the tragedy of the war in Iraq.  And I have earned the right to make such a challenge.Prior to my retirement in 1993, I was a Chief Master Sergeant with a 21-year career in military intelligence as a foreign linguist, intelligence analyst, and intelligence operations superintendent.  I loved the volunteer military.  It gave me a career, maturity, and education beyond anything I foresaw when I enlisted in 1972.  But I honestly fear we’ve all but destroyed the soul of the volunteer force in which I was so honored to serve. We are rapidly approaching a tipping point where those remaining in the military will be the ones who have to serve to maintain their families and gain an opportunity to improve themselves, rather than those who serve because they are willing to stand the line for the rest of their countrymen.  My friends still in the military tell me that the best and the brightest are leaving the force at the first opportunity–not because they’ve lost their sense of duty to this country, but because they don’t believe the rest of the country truly shares in their sacrifice.

It isn’t hard to understand.  We pay no additional taxes, don’t volunteer our time, yell “bring ‘em on”, and think that a yellow ribbon on the trunk of our car is all it takes to prove we have their backs.

Well before my article about Garrett Smith’s suicide and before our actual invasion of Iraq, I authored another op-ed in the Oregonian.  I think time has only proven the basic truth it pointed to at the time–that our volunteer force has been tacitly translated by our lack of personal involvement and investment into a foreign legion. 

The only difference is that, rather than recruiting from abroad, we recruit from the sectors of our own society where the military may be the only opportunity for a new life.  Freed from any personal risk by their willingness to fight in our stead, we can send them off to war assured that our lives and the lives of our children won’t be disturbed in any way at all.

I was impressed with Senator Smith’s willingness to open himself up to the country about a personal crisis in an effort to help others understand the hidden epidemic of depression and suicide.  I believe Senator Smith and all our legislators must be just as courageous now.  They must lead the country to do the right thing to resolve this hidden crisis faced by our military men and women—to move citizens to truly share in their sacrifice, to cease funding an illegal and immoral war, and to bring our service members home immediately to the honor and homage they deserve.  The clock is at the hour where decisive action is necessary to save the best military the world has ever seen

It’s early Monday and I’m wrapping up another weekend as the only aging-services crisis response worker on call for all of Multnomah County, a job I share on a rotating basis with three colleagues. Since Friday evening, I’ve gone seven times to the home of an elderly demented, blind and diabetic woman whose sole caregiver is acutely ill and unable to care for himself, much less provide for her medical and other needs. I fear for her safety, but there’s nothing I can do but leave her and check back later, because she’s still legally able to make her own decisions.

I’ve placed a lonely 81-year-old man with no remaining family in a motel for the weekend because police at the airport figured the five days he’d spent there waiting for someone to notice him were enough. I’ve taken reports of elderly people who have been emotionally, physically and financially abused by their families.

I’ve called a host of older people just to make sure that they’re still alive in their apartments or homes, where they live in conditions that are sometimes worse than I’ve seen in any Third World country I’ve visited — not because they want to live that way, but because there simply isn’t anyone who cares enough to help them.

I’ve been doing this for seven years now. As funding for social programs has decreased and our community’s safety net has shrunk, my job has turned into a dark tragedy. Don’t get me wrong; I still love my work. But I’ve recently caught myself thinking that perhaps I don’t want to grow old in this country. It isn’t that I don’t want to live to a ripe old age, but I don’t want to end up alone, dependent upon someone like me to find me in a sea of similarly sinking souls.

I hear the complaints people make about civil servants, but I honestly can’t find anyone I respect more. While many Americans think of service in terms of how much to tip someone, these people think of it in terms of how they can improve the lives of those less blessed. They begin their work every day with no hope of finishing it, understanding that for every person they help, there are probably 10 or more people who need their help more.

I feel honored to work with them — people dedicated to countering the wave of public apathy and neglect, and the oddly American belief that older people lose their value as they lose their ability to work or care for themselves.

In the early morning hours when the pager goes off, that’s the thought that gets us out of our warm beds to head out alone into the darkness one more time.

I wish my dad were still alive to see it. Watching the leaders of the United States, Russia, Germany and Japan casually sharing a joke like old friends, as they did recently while meeting to celebrate the end of the war in Europe in 1945, would have seemed a surreal joke to a World War II soldier. But my dad never really talked much about the war. He talked a lot, though, about the differences in America before and after he went overseas.

My dad came from an America that only vaguely resembled the nation today. Poverty was rampant, college educations were primarily for the privileged, and the economy was limping slowly away from the hopelessness of the Great Depression.

Dad once told me that I should look at the pictures of people being processed through the enlistment stations during the war. He dared me to find a fat person. Not because people were in so much better shape in 1941, but because hardly anyone who was draft eligible back then had enough to eat.

He was right, of course. Dad told me that a lot of people joined the Army during World War II to serve their country; however, it didn’t hurt recruitment any that their country was also going to serve them…three square meals a day. Patriotism has many faces, not all of them altruistic.

After World War II, my dad and his fellow veterans returned to an America committed to repaying them for their sacrifice. The GI Bill literally transformed the nature of the American citizenry from uneducated to educated, from unemployed to employed, and from hopeless to supremely confident in the future. Social Security and the other great post-depression social programs only added to that optimism. Their world changed remarkably as a result.

And you and I and our children? We are the recipients of things my father and his generation probably never even dreamed possible. I often look around me today and, in contrast to my father’s challenge to find a fat person in the picture, I am sorely pressed to locate a skinny one.

Because of that, I find it difficult to comprehend when my fellow citizens and our government leaders pronounce the need to slash social programs, when they call weak those who can’t simply pick themselves up by their bootstraps, and when they cut funding and services that provide seniors and the less fortunate members of our society with the basic necessities of a civilized existence. All because they can’t find it within themselves to pay a tax rate that is already the lowest among all of our counterpart nations.

Saddest of all, the persons most affected by this delusional belief that less is always more are the very people who appreciate the difference these so-called “entitlement” programs made in all of our lives. I see their disappointment in my job as an Aging Services crisis worker when they ask why their medications aren’t covered, their health needs aren’t met, and their basic human dignity isn’t respected. It makes me ashamed.

I hope they can forgive us for our blind selfishness. And my dad? I’m sorry he isn’t here to see the joke session in Moscow, but I’m glad he doesn’t have to witness the cavalier abandonment of the great investments that, to him and others his age, were truly tickets to a new life.

The testimony before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday by Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore, concerning the suicide of his son, Garrett, was truly courageous. Suicide of a loved one is a subject that is extremely difficult for most people to discuss in private among trusted friends, much less in a public forum where the inevitable criticisms of what the senator and his family might have done to prevent Garrett’s death will inevitably arise.

Smith’s public airing of his and his family’s grief, his poignant description of their search to find meaning in this most personal of tragedies, and his pledge to help other families prevent further needless deaths are selfless actions that represent the highest and best use of his public office.

His story was particularly poignant for me. I work as a mental health investigator for Washington County. It is a job that few people know about outside the rather insular world of others in similar positions. Every day, suicidal individuals suffering from depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental conditions come or are brought to emergency rooms across the state.

Many are seeking help to keep them from acting on their suicidal impulses and are willing to do whatever is required to keep themselves safe. Many others, however, arrive at the hospital having just attempted to kill themselves or with imminent plans to do so, yet are unwilling to voluntarily accept treatment to keep them from completing the act.

The latter are the people we see every day. Our job is to determine whether they are truly likely to attempt to take their own lives if no outside intervention is brought to bear. But what we do is not the focus here. They are. We see them in the moment, often just hours after taking an overdose, cutting their wrists or stabbing themselves, shooting themselves or intentionally placing themselves in potentially lethal situations that have resulted in serious or disabling injuries.

We also see their families, most of whom are devastated by something that they cannot truly comprehend.

I admit that I still struggle with the issue. I likely always will—in spite of an excellent education; more than 13 years as a mental health professional; past work counseling people who have lost relatives to suicide; my own continuing struggle with bouts of major depression; and the past three years dealing daily with people who have tried to take their own lives and often are sorry they didn’t succeed. If the will to live is a basic tenet of human experience that most of us accept without question, the will to die is an idea we are most comfortable ignoring.

Ignorance, though, is something we cannot afford when the subject is suicide. Unselfish disclosures like those by Gordon Smith are crucial in helping us to combat our self-defensive tendencies and to bring the problem into the light. We have to push ourselves beyond our revered societal norms of bootstrapping and independence to realize that mental illness can completely rob people of their abilities to achieve self-reliance.

Left alone, kept at a safe distance out of our own need for personal comfort, they can and do kill themselves—leaving us to attempt to reconcile our own blindness and inaction with the overwhelming grief, loss and responsibility we bear as a result.

There is hope, however, as Smith reminded us. Modern medications have proven extremely effective in combating the depression and psychotic symptoms that often move people to commit suicide.

Research is ongoing into more reliable means of identifying and recognizing those who are prone to harm themselves. But the true hope isn’t in a pill or a syringe or inside a psychiatric ward somewhere. Rather, it lies in our willingness to admit our own inherent vulnerability to despair and surrender to the darker elements of our lives—to realize that we’re not so different as we might think from those who actually kill themselves.

And to let others in our lives know that we care for them and are there for them, if for no other reason than that every human life is precious in and of itself. That’s a goal we call all embrace and one that, even if it saves just one life along the way.