BRATTLEBORO — When I saw Molly Osowski's long, thoughtful, and achingly beautiful post on Facebook in March, I knew I was reading something special.
It was a voice from someone from the region who was writing clearly and from the heart about a problem that is alternatively ignored and talked to death - heroin.
We have published pieces in these pages from young people who have struggled with addiction, but this Viewpoint was something new. It was from a sober young woman who was looking at friends who were not so lucky, who still sees what so many people can't or won't: that they became addicted to drugs when they still were children.
Within minutes after I blindly wrote her, Molly Osowski - who hails from Greenfield, Mass. and has many Brattleboro area connections - graciously let me share her story, and it ran in the April 1 issue. It soon became very, very clear that I was not the only one who thought it was something very special.
The online version of her piece has been shared more than 9,200 times on social media and email; our web traffic for last month increased tenfold, all from this one story. Her original Facebook post has likely had far more of a viral impact, and her words have been shared far and wide on Reddit, Tumblr, and any number of other venues.
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Which brings us to this piece and its more than 700 reader comments.
“They are human. They were kids.” inspired people young and old from all over the country and the world to weigh in, and by far the majority of the reactions were positive.
For years, we have made it clear on our website that comments will be considered for the Letters from Readers column. We don't like the web version of The Commons to exist in its own vacuum - we have many readers who, through circumstance, proud rebellion, or tin-can-and-wax-string Internet connections, will never see the website, or who are waiting until it is optimized for tablets and phones (which is in progress). So these comments that originated online have, as a rule, cycled back into print.
Without publishing a book, there is simply no way to even begin to run more than a fraction of the comments in print. I am thinking about ways we might do that, to give our analog readers a taste of this amazing and heartbreaking forum.
In the meantime, I urge you to grab a coffee, settle back, and check out the discussion in its entirety online. (I've even made it easy to find, unlike most of our website archives: just type molly.commonsnews.org.) You also might want to keep some tissues handy. While you're there, do tell us what you think.
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And as for Molly Osowski, whose voice of strength, compassion, and clarity struck such a nerve?
When I talked with her several days after she wrote that open letter, she was somewhat blindsided by the reaction to words that she told me just poured out in the space of a day.
She said that when she was in school, she never pursued any studies related to writing. Nor did she think she'd ever be in the spotlight as a voice of consequence on this issue.
But within days, politicians, health care professionals, and policy makers - the people who are trying to figure out how to stem this tide - have been in touch with her and are seeking her counsel.
The politicians wrestle with the public policy of drugs, law enforcement, and treatment - and the squeeze of budgets beyond their breaking points. The media tends to dehumanize and sanitize the discussion.
And in this overwhelming maelstrom of people talking at one another, a voice of compassion, practicality, and reason emerged, and that's why it struck such a nerve.
Sometimes, something just needs to be said. And sometimes it takes someone who is an eyewitness, someone who has lived and felt the issue, to be the one to say it so very well.