I don’t like it when people wax poetic about hope. Hope is not words or feelings. Hope is not optimism. Hope is something we have to go out and build, in concrete and material ways. Hope is bread. Hope is sanctuary. Hope is Narcan.
At my church, in the most economically distressed county in Washington State, we have started dispensing Narcan and training people on how to administer it. We consider this to be a “project of survival,” in the lineage of the Black Panthers’ free medical clinics and free breakfast programs for children. In Chicago right now, there are community members training themselves as street medics to perform first aid on gunshot victims, in the absence of an adequate structural response to their crisis. Similarly, here in Grays Harbor County, WA, there’s an absence of adequate structural response to our opioid overdose death rates. So like Chicago today, and like the Panthers of the past, we are organizing to honor and protect lives threatened by an existing system that wants poor people dead.
[aesop_image img=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ScottPicture1.png” panorama=”off” imgwidth=”50%” alt=”Narcan” align=”left” lightbox=”on” caption=”Some people tell us that Narcan “enables” addicts. We say: Jesus brought people back from the dead, so it seems like fine ministry to us.” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
If we take the media narratives at face value, it seems like everybody was completely caught off guard by the opioid epidemic. “How could this happen, in the heartland of America! In the rust belt! In the suburbs!” Don’t trust the tone of surprise. This thing has been coming for a long time.
Here on the Harbor, our opioid overdose death rate is double the state average. You would think, with those bleak odds, there’d be significant public investment in providing medically sound, effective prevention and treatment programs. The opposite is true. This region has invested far more heavily in incarceration and policing than in healing. Since the timber industry packed up and left town in the 1990s, the main replacement industry has been incarceration. It starts early, too: Grays Harbor County incarcerates children for nonviolent, non-criminal offenses at a higher rate than any other county in the US. The ACLU recently sued our juvenile detention facility for torturing a child. Why invest in children, or in healing and recovery, when there’s money to be made, through various contracts, in keeping the jails full?
[aesop_image img=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ScottPicture2.png” alt=”Chehalis River in Aberdeen, WA” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Overlooking the Chehalis River in Aberdeen, WA. On the left, juvie. On the right, the last remaining shred of timber jobs. This county incarcerates kids for nonviolent, noncriminal offenses at a higher rate than any county in the US. The mills closed, the prison opened, and the juvie population grows and grows.” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
In a region with few living-wage jobs and woefully inadequate healthcare, poor people—especially millennials—repeatedly cycle through the courts and jails (and eventually prison), engaging in various survival crimes and self-medicating to cope with pain, cold, hunger and trauma. These are the children and grandchildren of loggers whose own bodies were broken by the resource-extraction economy of their day—workers who were frequently left disabled by the brutality of their industry, and prescribed painkillers that eventually became inaccessible, leading them to turn to heroin.
In the previous generation, the resources being extracted were timber and human labor. Today, the resources being extracted are human freedom and sobriety. By keeping large numbers of young, unemployed adults trapped in this ongoing medical, psychological, and legal crisis, the system puts a hurting on people’s ability to organize and demand change.
But it can’t stop us.
We’ve buried fourteen members of our base community in the last twelve months. Many of those deaths were caused by overdose, or by health complications resulting from long-time drug use. When the Poor People’s Campaign sent a delegation out here in May 2017, we had to scrap the first day’s itinerary to perform yet another last-minute funeral. Civil rights veteran Bob Zellner was the first to roll up his sleeves and don an apron washing dishes at the funeral reception. At Chaplains on the Harbor we’ve been forced to learn how to turn organizing tours into funerals, and turn funerals into base building events.
We are sick to death of the funerals. So for the short term, we are leaning on Narcan. For the long term, we are working toward a comprehensive reentry program that connects our brilliant young incarcerated leaders to housing, decent employment, health care, therapy, recovery support, and ongoing popular education upon release. Many of our young adults emerge from prison with skills in carpentry and culinary arts. We seek to hire them to rebuild the physical ruins of Grays Harbor County, to feed local people who are starving in the midst of natural abundance, and to always keep an eye on the horizon by studying and learning from other people’s struggles for liberation. We believe that nobody’s more qualified to be a “restorer of streets to live in” (Isaiah 58) than a kid who’s had to live on the streets for most of their life.
This may sound like an absurd pipe dream, especially for a place so slammed by poverty and heroin, but we have confronted far greater absurdities in this work. And we have also confronted the powerful grit, resilience, and redemptive labor of our community, which we know better than to underestimate. After all, the powers and principalities of this world wouldn’t be working so hard to try and kill us if we weren’t so strong.
[aesop_image img=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ScottPicture3.png” alt=”Chaplains on the Harbor” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Strong people are harder to kill.” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
Aaron Scott is a street chaplain and organizer at Chaplains on the Harbor—a ministry rooted in good news of the poor, by the poor, for the poor in Grays Harbor County, Washington State.