It's a scenario playing out all across America. Someone slips so deeply into drinking that they lose their job. Then, their family kicks them out of the home because they do not want to "enable" them. They do not want to be providing a place where the person can just drink and live without paying their own way. After all, if a person doesn't have to pay their way, they will have no incentive to go out and get a job, right? If they can just lounge around and be drunk all day, they'll do it, right? So, the family of such a person often feels that providing free housing is enabling the child. They feel if the child is to be handled properly, he or she must learn to be responsible for his own actions.
Truly, we as a society don't know how to handle this situation. We grapple, wanting to help, but not wanting to encourage the drunkenness by providing a free place to stay, not wanting to reward bad behavior. I, too, do not know what to do, how to handle it. I wonder on this, what should be done for these people to give them a path back.
The first step, perhaps, is to recognize that we have a problem, that problem being that we haven't come up with a way to handle them. With so many lives being lost to alcohol, this seems an urgent matter. If lives are being lost -- and they are -- if we can save them, we must.
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