What do you do when a community problem becomes too big to ignore too powerful to fix without great effort?

We might take some advice from a respected engineer.

The late Randy Pausch, professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and author of the bestselling book, “The Last Lecture,” was an irrepressible educator who said a lot of memorable things. Among them this gem:

“My dad always taught me that when there’s an elephant in the room, introduce them.”

With inimitable light humor, Pausch was describing his personal elephant: ten tumors that were destroying his liver and rapidly killing him. Pausch wanted his audience to know that he intended to go on living a rich and fulfilling life and encouraging others to do the same, as long as he was able.

“So that is what it is,” he said in that famous 2007 lecture, which he later expanded into the book. “We can’t change it, and we just have to decide how we’re going to respond to that. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you. And I assure you I am not in denial. It’s not like I’m not aware of what’s going on.”

Dwelling on Pausch’s words, let’s acknowledge that we have a very large elephant in the living room of Butler County; that is, the scourge of opioid and opiate addiction in all forms, from street heroin to synthetics like fentanyl, prescriptions like oxycodone or hydrocodone, and even misused addiction treatments like Suboxone.

In 2016 there were a record 74 confirmed fatal overdoses in Butler County, compared with 47 deaths in 2015. Last year’s death was three funerals every two weeks — all for loved ones and neighbors who died too young, too soon, for reasons that could and should have been avoided.

There’s no telling how many lives were spared in 2016 by the application of Narcan, the heroin antidote that’s now routinely carried by EMT and other emergency first responders. Were it not for Narcan, the spike in deaths would have been much greater.

So that is what it is. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.

Borrowing Pausch’s mind-set, the Butler Eagle intends to keep track of the number of fatal drug overdoses in Butler County during the year, and display the number every week on Thursday’s editorial page. We do this not as an exercise in morbidity, but rather as a reminder that this is the hand we’ve been dealt — this is our elephant.

Let’s also pick up on a key part of Professor Pausch’s joy of life: his conscious choice to see and appreciate the wonder of our existence and our dreams, even when confronted with the pall of untimely death.

Of all the things to dwell on, Pausch’s last lecture became celebrated because he chose to remain focused on dreams — his own and others’.

“I’ve been very fortunate that way, how I believe I’ve been able to enable the dreams of others, and to some degree, lessons learned,” Pausch said. “There should be some lessons learned and how you can use the stuff you hear today to achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others. And as you get older, you may find that ‘enabling the dreams of others’ thing is even more fun” than pursuing your own dreams.

Food for thought for a struggling community.