OPINION: TIME WILL TELL –

Nov. 1, 2023 – I can’t stand moral puritans who sniff about free will and justify the deaths of addicts by saying they are “chosen”. Anyone who has known or been a person with substance issues knows that “choice” is a very spurious concept in active addiction. Even if we were to accept that an addict “chooses” to destroy themselves, is bringing about your own ruin not devastating enough to warrant our sympathy? Oscar Wilde said, “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell,” which seems to me a more intolerable sort of misery than sudden acts of God.

And yet I still wanted Perry’s death to be a freak health event, unrelated to substance abuse. Like my friend who couldn’t bear the idea of Williams being claimed by the thing he fought so valiantly against, it made me too sad to think of Perry’s years of struggle being underwritten by a certain kind of sad death, seen as inevitable by the world.

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