My extended family includes enough drunks to populate an AA chapter. I’ve had close friends and roommates who drag broken relationships, lost jobs, destroyed bodies, and jail terms in the long train of empty bottles that follows them everywhere they go. I’m familiar with alcohol abuse, and how, when you have a problem with it, it can infect everything.
I’m also familiar with the way that it can seem not to. How you can feel that you have this issue—this booze thing—compartmentalized from the rest of your life. If you’re a certain kind of binge drinker, you can easily convince yourself that the problem is that you got drunk, not that you are a drunk. That your job and family responsibilities are over here, and your alcohol issues are over there, even if your family and co-workers tell you differently. Sometimes that sense of compartmentalization is part of what makes drinking seem okay: It’s a place you think you might escape to, away from your responsibilities. I’m good. Don’t worry about it.
If you’re lucky, the friends telling you they see a problem will convince you. And you’ll realize that there was nothing compartmentalized about it, that every aspect of your life was being dragged down by this thing you didn’t think was a problem and didn’t want to talk about. That only becomes clear, and it only starts to get better, once you acknowledge it and deal with it.
I don’t know if Rob Ford has a drinking problem. I know he says he doesn’t, and his brother Doug says he doesn’t.
But I also know that he was convicted once in Florida for DUI—and later denied it. I know he was once kicked out of a Leafs game for drunkenly berating strangers around him—and later denied it. I know that the police have been called to his house over domestic disputes at least a few times, and that once it was his in-laws phoning to say he was drunkenly threatening to leave the country with his children. (His brother later denied that on his behalf.) I know pictures and reports surface on social media all the time, reporting the mayor at the liquor store, or the mayor looking a shambles at some bar. And I know there are a lot of questions about if and when the mayor will show up to events, and that his schedule is a closely guarded secret with large amounts of his time unaccounted for. I know his career has been defined as much by erratic behavior as it has been by populist politics.
And now I know what the Star reported this week: that he has been at public events recently where people claim he was intoxicated. That three councillors have backed up what the Star is reporting. And, according to trusted reporters Kevin Donovan and Robyn Doolittle, current and former members of his staff claim this is an issue affecting his job performance, and have encouraged him to seek help or enter rehab.
This is not normal. I’m good, don’t worry about it doesn’t cut it. A string of events and issues like that, a series of indiscretions and irregularities to be explained or denied like that—that’s the sign of some kind of problem.
And I know that when it comes to Rob Ford, you can’t separate the personal from the political. His personal foibles were part of his populist appeal from the beginning—they help form his everyman political persona. And he is the political representative of the city: The sad circus that he stars in, no matter what causes it, infects every element of Toronto’s politics.
So, if Rob Ford has a problem, whatever it is, we as a city have a problem. It can’t be compartmentalized and ignored. The good news for Rob Ford is that he remains surrounded by a staff who appear to want to help him through it. I expect even his opponents have the empathy to be supportive of any attempt he’d make to get better. I sincerely hope he acknowledges it and deals with it, whatever the issue may be—for his own sake, for the sake of his family, of his friends and supporters, and for the sake of the rest of us who he represents, too.
Original Article
Source: thegridto.com
Author: Edward Keenan
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