Document text
Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad January 20, 2005 Recycle cards Please send your discarded Christmas cards to: St. Jude's Ranch for Children 100 St. Jude St. Boulder City, NV 89005 They cut them up and paste them into unique collages. Thanks! Carola Lacy Ashland Thanks to ACH It was recently my misfortune to require a few days stay in the Ashland Community Hospital. Now, being hospitalized is never a very pleasant experience. You are there to be cured, not to rest, and the process can be distressing. However, because of the attitude of the staff at ACH - positive, pleasant, caring - from top to bottom, my stay was as tolerable as it could possibly be. I thank them for their truly concerned care, their smiles and their cheerfulness. I sincerely hope I will not be needing their services again for some time, but should that be my fate, I can't think of a better place for it to happen. Robert Graham Ashland The loss of one bears light on loss of many By Leah Ireland Ashland The front-page story of local activist, artist, comedienne, and writer Joanie McGowan's suicide was an unbearable headline of atrocity here at home. It is odd how many of us can't conceive of the death in the hundreds of thousands that we pay for with our tax dollars, but when death hits someone we know, we get the concept. Though McGowan's reasons for suicide are private, her struggle with depression shows how much we need to support our mental as well as physical health facilities in this town. No matter how rich and privileged Ashland is, we've achieved nothing if we do not care for those in need. We enter a world of those with dazzling teeth or none at all, those who have too much money and those who can't work hard and fast enough to survive. McGowan's death is about many things, but it is also about how hard our dreamers, poets, movers and shakers, artists, writers, thinkers, entertainers, musicians, have it here in art-land. Then there is this "Neo-Con" Fascism Hummer world America has become that has no tolerance for free thinking, creativity, and freedom of speech on any level, and wages a war on freedom and development of the mind as well as a war on all artists except those that play at their conventions. We live in a culture at war with our best and brightest, especially any who speak truth to power. We are a nation at war with intelligence itself, where governors rise from violent movie stars, and presidents proud of their ignorance are allowed to wage war on innocents because they are Christian and have "family values." What McGowan epitomized was the individual spirit and its power, that we have to be do-gooders not good-lifers. Living in a country that spends a billion a day to kill and control foreigners while it spending nothing to care for its citizens, is something we let happen and must change no matter what. Unless the world is a safe place for our gifted ones, unless those with a passion for heaven on earth can thrive on earth, it will never happen. Unless the innocent and simple are safe in our world, it is no world at all. We know an empire is dying when its gifted are silenced in the struggle merely to survive. The suicide reflects how terrified of death we are as a culture. Suicide is the taboo subject no one wants to talk about, even most therapists and religious leaders. Nature's most natural and inevitable occurrence must not be one of such defeat and despair. Death should be an experience of travel, not tragedy, transformation not disintegration, of life to light. Maybe it is time to take death out of the hands of greedy insurance companies and the AMA, and back into the realm of care, love, and yes, even great hope. The death of spirit is one no realm can afford. Suicide teaches that suicide must no longer be a taboo subject, especially among family, friends, and therapists. Isn't it time we talk about it? The suicide of our children is our greatest tragedy and failure, but also a demand from God that we make life better for everyone. Joanie is in the magnificent mural she painted at Geppettos. It is a world of environmental bliss that encourages its artists and activists, its funny ones, praising as heroic the misfits on earth, placing as divine: the faithful dog. This is the place all great religious writing, including the Bible, have been trying to tell us about. Leah Ireland is a former commentator for the Ashland Daily Tidings and a frequent contributor to the editorial page. --> Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.