Posted on 05/22/2018 8:27:51 AM PDT by OneVike
On May 1, Jason Bigelow’s body was discovered in an abandoned house near High Point. He had been missing from his Asheboro home for a week, and while the autopsy results are still pending, his wife, Anna, has no doubt what the cause of death was.
On April 30, the day before he was found, she posted this on Facebook in one angry, anguished burst:
Jason and Anna’s story begins at Appalachian State University where they were students. One day in the library, he walked up to the pretty co-ed, teasing her that she needed to leave because she was “distracting him and he wasn’t getting any work done.” From there, Jason pursued her romantically, and while she was at first reluctant, soon found herself falling in love.
“My husband is missing and no one has heard from him in 6 days. Even in his darkest of times he would have not gone that long without communication. It’s hard to know what to feel, stricken with fear, paralyzed with worry.
“Addiction, it’s the one word no one wants to talk about, like a dark secret, but it’s destroyed so many lives. To be honest I’m not mad at Jason. If anything I’m mad at the community who looked at him so differently because of his addictions and faults. I feel like God’s grace has never run out on him, but our grace ran out for him. People think here we go again, or it’s another relapse, or if he loved his family then why couldn’t he just quit. I will say this, I have never once doubted Jason’s love for me or the kids.
“Addiction is like a dark cloud that comes in and consumes you, takes away your ability to make a choice and torments your soul. I apologize for my brutal honesty, but maybe that’s what this town needs, not small talks, pretend smiles and bull****. But truth, our struggles, our weaknesses.”
(Excerpt) Read more at courier-tribune.com ...
Sorry to hear. My eldest brother died of cancer brought on by his alcoholism. He lived in the street for 8 of his last 10 years of life.
Cancer ate away his stomach, liver, pancreas, and anything else it could find to destroy.
He stopped due to the fact he hurt so bad he could even drink water barely. It wad too late though, even though he hung on for two years.
Cannot say if he found Christ, I know he knew Him as a young man, but he was like 11 years older than me and so other than what I knew of him some 40 years ago, I cannot say I knew much about him.
I pray he met Christ and renewed his relationship before he died.
No, I don’t think I’ll stop commenting here.
I have plenty of experience with addiction, I’ve had it in my family and I am sure I am susceptible myself. Everyone has an excuse, and “suggested” genetics is a handy one.
Everyone who wants to duck responsibility has an excuse.
My dad was a lifelong alcoholic who got sober in the last years of his life, and dedicated a good part of his remaining life to helping others. It was a family intervention that helped him. He went to and ran AA meetings, sometimes as many as four a week for the rest of his life.
Not once, ever, for any reason, did my dad EVER blame anyone other than himself for his addiction. Never. And I respect him more than anyone else, and that is one reason. He was always an advocate of personal responsibility, and instilled that in us.
And my dad, who spent the last 15 years of his life among addicts of all kinds up to four nights a week, providing jobs for many of them at home if he couldn’t find one for them where he worked, knew what he was talking about even if he didn’t have some piece of crap degree from some piece of crap researcher that said people can’t help themselves and have no responsibility for their actions.
Perhaps you didn’t read my post. I’ll summarize it again for you: I sympathize with addicts and believe we should help them. But I detest people who say it isn’t the addict’s fault.
A person may have been dealt a bad hand, genetically, personally, or economically, but a lot of people are, and they don’t become addicts.
You are right. My younger years were consumed with my right to be a and angry proud loser.
Those years destroyed many relationships I had, most of which I could never go back to. Sometimes the bridges you burn can never be rebuilt, even if they are personal close family members.
My wife tells people that I hate liberals so bad because I was sold the lie and the lie only destroyed everything I tried to build.
Yea, bad idea, but when you are so lost in the desire for what you believe you need, bringing a child with is just another thing you are responsible for but truly could care less about.
The evil of drugs and alcohol destroys ones dense of responsible behavior.
“The evil of drugs and alcohol destroys ones dense of responsible behavior.”
Actually, lots of people manage to have a drink and do drugs, and do not take their kids along on an armed bank robbery.
These people are thugs, and do not deserve our sympathy.
Thank you. I did many things I am not proud of, and will never pretend I was doing right. I give credit to God through Christ. He is the inky One who turned my life around, and now I must live with my past.
I do love my children, and will always be their when they need me, but I will never help them be addicts. I refuse to be an enabler to suicide by bad behavior.
Thank you. My love will never die for them.
Awesome that you’ve changed your tone once someone called you out on it. Your first post was cold-hearted and mean. Now you’ve softened your stance and explained your personal experience. Sad that you had to deal with addiction, I have had to also. But I have a seriously different viewpoint. Once addicts take that first drink/shot/pill, their brain makes it very hard for them to make any appropriate choice (<- that is the kicker right there).
I have no compassion for anyone on this thread telling me an addict has a choice. For goodness sake, many can’t even take a Tylenol 3 without serious consequences. Without absolute surety (because science hasn’t created a easy home test <- makes it hard to choose), many can not take a prescribed medicine (opiod or a psychotropic drug) or a drink without potential consequences of awakening the addiction. And then it’s over.
You should avoid using the word “choice”, it really isn’t one.
WTF? You are out of your mind.
We need real solutions, not fantasy ones.
Agree. . .
He is referring to the fact that they committed an armed robbery.
It seems some are genetically predisposed to this as well?
/s not buying it.
Every time you pop the pill you are making a decision. We are not puppets run by DNA.
I have a friend with inoperable brain cancer. That’s genetic. And she indeed is not making a choice in the matter.
Being that he is dead, he was a thug.
And being that she is alive, she is a thug.
Junkies
Bank robbers
While you may, I have no sympathy for junkies who rob banks
I have a friend with inoperable brain cancer. That’s genetic. And she indeed is not making a choice in the matter.
Spot on.
The confusion arises from defining addiction as something a person IS, rather than something a person DOES. A person can “be” an alcoholic even though he never touches booze. A person can be an addict without ever using drugs.
Behaviorists would disagree.
The “being” part may not be a choice, any more than a person chooses to be diabetic or have cancer. But the “doing” — drinking, using, gambling, etc. — those are choices.
I’m sorry for your son. I feel bad for your suffering and your self blame which all parents who care would have. Prayers up for you all.
I was feeling bad for the wife in the article too, until it came to the part where she started using and shooting up to connect to him. I was married to an alcoholic and never did I think, that looks so good and maybe I’d be closer to him, let’s start drinking heavily. I couldn’t relate. I’m glad she cleaned herself up for her kids. I hope they take after her, now seeing what addiction does.
The only way not to become addicted to street drugs is never to take them. With medically prescribed drugs, it is a different story. But I have found my way to use opiates when necessary and get off them the second they aren’t. You must plan ahead and obey your system. NO ONE SHOJLD TRUST DOCTORS BLINDLY. I don’t know why anyone ever does. They are only people.
You guys are killin me
The issue is that you read and interpret what you want to hear. My response below is long, and I hope you will take the time to read it before you post to me again.
I said nothing that was comprehensively different between the two posts except for the personal viewpoint on it, so it wasn’t an issue for me of being “called out”. As a son of a lifelong alcoholic, I watched the strain it put on our family (my mother in particular) and had a ringside seat to what drug abuse is capable of doing to a family. I have a close nephew who went to jail as a heroin addict, and another who died likely as a result of his addictive behavior.
I have very strong feelings on this, so this is not personally directed at you, and specifically NOT at any individual addict.
IMPORTANT: My anger is not at the addicted. I feel compassion for them, since they are often beyond controlling what they can do, and usually that means they have a way to go before they hit bottom.
My anger is 100% at the elements of society who want to make addicts seem no more culpable to their plight than a man who sits in front of an oncologist who tells him that he has prostate cancer. So yes, I am angry about that, because as I outline below, it DOES NOT HELP THOSE WHO ARE ADDICTED IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER.
The fundamental issue is that people (usually Leftists, but apparently not always) want to separate people from personal responsibility. If people like homosexuals and addicts can be said to have a genetic condition that frees them from societal norms or personal responsibilities, that is a good thing for them.
If you can’t help what you are, you have no burden on you to adhere to behavior considered to be necessary to an orderly society, such as avoiding robbing people who love you to pay for your drug habit, getting into a car so intoxicated that you have a head on collision with another vehicle killing all the innocent occupants, or engaging in risky sexual behavior that causes you to be a burden on society because you have contracted AIDS.
It is also why leftists have worked so hard to identify genetic tags for criminality. If you have the genetics to be a criminal, you can’t be responsible for killing, assaulting or robbing people, because, hey, it is in your genetics, and is no different from your sex or your skin color.
Because if it can be pinned on genetics, it becomes a civil rights issue and not a personal behavior issue. The Left does the same thing with Poverty, Ignorance, and Disease. People can’t help what they are because they are poor, didn’t have enough money spent on their education, or are susceptible to disease (I side with them on disease to a degree)
Bottom line, using genetic makeup as an excuse absolves people from their flaws and doesn’t get in the way of the Leftist Utopia that the left tries to achieve.
According to them, all people can be made perfect according to the left, and it is possible because none of us has any control over what we are. If we are flawed, bad, or even evil, then our imperfect society MADE us that way, and we can fix society so there will be no individual crime, no addiction, no perversion.
Well they can’t.
Just as some people are evil, some people are imperfect and flawed, and no amount of fixing society is going to change that.
See, you think that because I take this stand, I lack compassion for addicts.
Not true.
I have a great deal of compassion for addicts first, because I lived through it, and secondly, because I believe I am prone to that myself. And even as small government person, I believe we should help these people when we can with things to address it, because I see it as a win-win. The addict can get free of their addiction, and society will save money over time through increased citizen productivity, tax contributions from working members of society, and reduced costs from the legal and medical side.
We do addicts no service by telling them it isn’t their fault and accepting this as normal, any more than pandering to transsexuals (by accepting their flaws on face value and normalizing their behavior instead of rejecting the “normality” and offering them psychiatric help) helps them.
I have been around enough addicts to know that until that person WANTS to be cured at the very core, they won’t be cured no matter how much sympathy, money, safe space, excuses, time, free needles and methadone you give them.
They have to be ready to be cured. And hitting the bottom is hard, not just for that person, but for the people who love them and have to watch them.
Watching someone “be ready” to be cured means having to lock your grown child out of the house and change the key. It means watching a marriage dissolve in front of your eyes. It means sometimes attending a funeral.
But until that happens, until an addict can accept responsibility for themselves, THEY ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE. That is what AA is about. I carry my dad’s last AA coin (his 15 year coin) and have for the past 18 years. Every day. Everywhere I go.
Because it is an inspiration to me. My dad said that kicking alcohol was the hardest thing he ever did, harder than kicking smoking. But he did it, he accepted full responsibility for who he was and what he was doing, and accepted the responsibility of turning himself around. I went to more than a few AA meetings with him over the years, and had the good fortune to be able to talk to him about his alcoholism, and hear his viewpoints on it. He was not shy about facing it, which should come as no surprise because he had to discuss those things with complete strangers for many years in a public forum.
When I am having a tough time, or putting it in my pocket in the morning and taking it out when I go to bed, I feel it in my fingers, and think “One Day At A Time.” And that is one of the most profound gifts my father has given me. The strength to own my shortcomings, and the knowledge that they can be overcome.
We don’t do addicts any favors by denying them that.
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