Some Greater Benefit

William Moyers
Fri, 05 Sep 2014 21:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

In a folder on my computer, I keep electronic copies of every column I've written since 2008. By chance just now I was perusing the hundreds of files, and I realized: Geez, I've written a lot. Six hundred words a week 50 weeks of the year times six years equals 180,000 words. Enough for an encyclopedia or a trilogy of books.

Yet I'm struck by how narrow is the range of topics. Over the years, I've offered my biased take on the "news" of the day involving a few crash-and burn celebrities (Jackson, Lohan and Houston). I've highlighted the oft-ignored stories of people like the rest of us who actually recover (Smith, Jones and Anderson). I've written about the drug "epidemics" that are really nothing more than the trend de jour of the year and the public policy tied to the failed war on drugs, pontificated on new treatments for addiction and what it means to recover from it. I've offered up nuggets of my own life's journey, especially as a father trying to raise three teenagers in a techno-fueled world seemingly beyond my control, as well as our family's struggles to keep it all together despite seismic shifts on the home front.

Most of all, I've offered frustratingly incomplete counsel to the sordidly detailed, anguished queries from readers who are desperate for help, for themselves or for their own families.
Updated: Sat Sep 06, 2014

In a folder on my computer, I keep electronic copies of every column I've written since 2008. By chance just now I was perusing the hundreds of files, and I realized: Geez, I've written a lot. Six hundred words a week 50 weeks of the year times six years equals 180,000 words. Enough for an encyclopedia or a trilogy of books.

Yet I'm struck by how narrow is the range of topics. Over the years, I've offered my biased take on the "news" of the day involving a few crash-and burn celebrities (Jackson, Lohan and Houston). I've highlighted the oft-ignored stories of people like the rest of us who actually recover (Smith, Jones and Anderson). I've written about the drug "epidemics" that are really nothing more than the trend de jour of the year and the public policy tied to the failed war on drugs, pontificated on new treatments for addiction and what it means to recover from it. I've offered up nuggets of my own life's journey, especially as a father trying to raise three teenagers in a techno-fueled world seemingly beyond my control, as well as our family's struggles to keep it all together despite seismic shifts on the home front.

Most of all, I've offered frustratingly incomplete counsel to the sordidly detailed, anguished queries from readers who are desperate for help, for themselves or for their own families.

I wrote a lot of words on a few subjects running the gamut from addiction to treatment to recovery to life on life's terms. Until addiction is cured (and that's a topic some of my colleagues and I are focused on right now), there are weeks I sit down at the keyboard with questions and issues to consider. But I'm feeling like I'm on a treadmill that won't stop. They are the same old issues that never end, and sometimes I wonder if it is worth my effort.

I have a friend who has been in recovery from alcoholism for 50-plus years. That's a long time, and he pays it back by helping scores of others like us get on the road to a better life. I respect him immensely, and so I was stung the other day when he questioned my intent in a column I had written in August about a fundraiser for a recovery organization hosted by a family who knows first hand the ravages of addiction. Alcohol was served.

He wrote: "As friends, at so many levels, it is hard to take in what you wrote. I have tried to imagine some greater benefit that was served (by your column), however misguided. But frankly, the unfolding damage is all I can see right now."

I understand his sentiment, though I doubt my 600 words spawned any unfolding damage. I'm told the event was a rousing success that will boost the recovery organization's impact to help more women and men find a safe retreat from addiction's ravages and gain traction in sobriety.

But it is his phrase "some greater benefit" that inspires me to keep writing. No matter how confining the issue, the problem of addiction is immense. No matter how predictable my advice, there are viable solutions that really do work. No matter how daunting the stigma, there is hope.

The greater benefit isn't that I can save the world from the ravages of alcoholism or drug dependence. Nobody's figured out how to do that, yet. It's that I have an opportunity to help save a life or two, or affirm the boundaries set by a parent, or tell others that it is OK to ask for help or remind somebody I've never met that they, too, can get well. How easy I forget sometimes that the challenge to write on a weekly deadline about the same old same old is really the opportunity to make a difference. Perhaps to somebody reading this right now.

A greater benefit measured in the smallest of ways.

Write on!