Killing It
It was by a lucky chance that I discovered Killing Season (2021), by Peter Canning, in the new books stack at the Public Library. I had been on the lookout for reference material dealing with the subject of my art (homelessness), its causes, and circumstances. Peter Canning is a career Paramedic. Nearing retirement age, he still works as a Paramedic, because it is his passion -and his experience is profound.
His other passion is writing and speaking about his first passion. Passion is not an exaggeration. He can't help himself, he cares deeply about the emergency victims he rescues. He knew some of them way back when. They are people in his own community who slipped through the cracks. I have to quote the following dialog. It reveals the human being that non-emergency persons never meet:
"Besides substance abuse," I ask, "do you have any other medical problems?"
"I broke my back cheerleading," she says.
I remember her now in her red uniform, the scared look in her eyes as everyone gathered around her where she had fallen.
"They dropped you?" She nods. I mentioned the name of the town.
"That was me," she says.
Years ago we put a cervical collar on her neck and lifted her carefully on a backboard. We drove slowly to the hospital, taking care not to hit the potholes.
"Do you mind if I ask how you ended up like this?"
"I had surgery and had to miss a lot of school," she says. "Life wasn't great. I was on Percocets for a year, and then my doctor told me I didn't need them anymore. I did."
She tells me she bought pills from a high school classmate to fight off the sickness of withdrawal. When she had trouble affording the pills, the same guy introduced her to heroin.
The writer tells of encountering many such tales of woe, of pain killers prescribed after an injury, termination of the prescription, but not before experiencing the power of Opioids to not just kill the pain, but make everything right that had never been right before and, finally, get hooked on Heroin. The victims Peter Canning describes likely touched you and your life at some point. Or will. They are the people around us.
I found Peter Canning's plea that we see derelicts on the street, who are incidentally drug addicts, or whatever problem it is they cannot control, as victims, not as a social problem, as validation of my own inclinations. The horror of vagrancy is not the unpleasantness of living rough, but the fateful mishap that started the downward spiral. If only we knew their whole story.
The graphic art of Brian Higgins can be viewed at: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/8-brian-higgins
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403