I’m feeling just a little overwhelmed and wishing in some ways that I were only teaching two classes this summer instead of three. My student’s last batch of papers has thrown me a bit. Some of the personal stories that they’ve shared about how drugs have affected their communities are just heart wrenching. One student wrote about working in a crematorium and “processing” a five year old boy who had been struck and killed by a car. The driver of the car was his thirteen year old sister. She was high on drugs and had stolen her mother’s car to go get more. She didn’t know that she’d hit anything until much later. A week after the boy’s death my student was “processing” the sister. She had deliberately overdosed; driven to suicide over the guilt from killing her brother. My real estate agent let me know that the school I am going to be teaching at has been raided for methamphetamines. Some of the properties we’ve looked at would need to be tested for methamphetamines (as labs can contaminate the walls) to ensure that they would be livable. America is losing more than one war right now.