Joe has more important things to see to.

Important. Interesting word. How do we measure important? Particularly when it comes to human fatalities. The mass media like blood. “If it bleeds it leads,” they used to say. It’s still the way they act. Why they let Biden get  away with the repulsive excuse he gave for not paying more attention to the crisis at the southern border. Yes, there’s talk of millions of illegals flooding across the border in states where the only unaffected people are the elected politicians who I’ve in gated communities surrounded by heavily armed guards. Even the word ‘millions’ has lost its meaning of late. Quick — how many millions in a billion? A thousand. How many millions in a trillion? A million. That’s right. This government has put our nation in debt by (conservatives, in just one year of Congessional spending) by more than 3 million million dollars. Which you have to pay for. But it’s not important enough to you to vote these catastrophe merchants out of office.   On the whole, Americans have more important things to do than take action against the utter destruction of their children’s and grandchildren’s future. Got it. That Trump fella’s Tweets. Intolerable. Ripping away women’s right to get an abortion if she wants one. Darn near evil. Along with his racism and sexism, three millions of millions of dollars thrown down a rat hole are a small price to pay. Right? Who’s got time to keep up with big numbers when gas prices over $3 a gallon actually hurt where it counts?

Who hasn’t heard that people are dying from Fentanyl. Last year it was oxycodone. The year before that it was methamphetamine. Who gives a damn. Drug addicts have been killing themselves forever, or at least in, you know big numbers since the 1960s. That’s not our problem. Our kids wouldn’t do that shit.

But they are doing that shit. In addition to the pot, the coke, the meth, the Ecstasy, the oxy, and now the Fentanyl. If you don’t know of any kid who’s died from these poisons in your neighborhood it can only be because you don’t want to know about it, hear about it, or see it laughing in your face. Like Joe the Potato.

If you knew or remembered how to add, you’d know these numbers add up. Even to the oh-so-organized, Fentanyl has become a major crisis, growing ferociously fast with no end in sight.

No, the 300 number can’t be proved yet. It takes a while to add up a year’s worth of dead when you only start your adding next year. Local reports from states and municipalities are consistent with the higher number, however. You can look these up for yourselves if you care. But do you? What do 300 deaths a day mean to you, especially if they’re occurring among the lame and the halt, and, yeah, true, the too young to know better?

Some canny reporter put it this way the other day. “It’s like a major commercial airline crash every single day.” Would that get headlines do you think, if it started to happen? The airline example isn’t the only one that drives the problem home. There are others, which we’ll get to, but flaming, dismembered passengers are a vivid image to start with.

The following dry facts and figures come from Wikipedia.

The people whose job it is to keep a major crash a day from happening have been doing an excellent job for many decades. The bracketed list includes just 13 airliner crashes that have ever killed 270 or more souls in every nation on earth since commercial aviation began a hundred years ago. It would take just 13 days for Fentanyl fatalities to exceed that total. If we were losing 100,000 people a year to airline crashes, heads would roll. Drugs? Meh. Wanna pass me that dooby, hon?

Is the number starting to seem more important yet? Drug overdoses are not natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and viral epidemics. They are a function of greed, money, official negligence, and popular indifference. Your indifference is also a cog in the killing machine.

300 a day is a higher death rate than American troops suffered during World War II. That number was about 270 a day for 1,612 days. Yeah. I’ve done the math on that too. (Why I drew the plane crash line at 270, the total being like 13 days of World War II spread over a century; plane crashes are scary, and wars not so much somehow. The ‘somebody else’ factor no doubt.)

We’re all aware, I know, of the costly national losses that are still commemorated with wreath laying sand reading of names and 21-gun salutes for decades after the fact. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 come to mind, both accounting for about 3,000 fatalities in a single day. How long do you calculate for a Fentanyl to rack up a number like that? Simple arithmetic. About 10 days. But there won’t be any wreaths or 21-gun salutes for those dead ones. Just the occasional 😲😟🙄 newspaper account of a vaguely described bust somewhere down south with completely hypothetical numbers in the millions just to keep people reading to the, yawn, end of the story.

It kinda looks like weed, doesn’t it? We been here before. We all know how to keep this kind of reporting from getting to us, don’t we? Why I’ll close here, with some pictures worth a few thousand words at,least, when the weed-looking stuff starts to look like recreational pills and even candy. Might be a good idea to check the Halloween loot your kids bring home from trick or treating next year. 

And I never even mentioned the name ‘China,’ the President’s good buddy on the other side of the world.