© words and picture by Dan DeMarle 2017

© words and pictures by Dan DeMarle 2017

words and picture by Dan DeMarle 2017

So a homeless man or woman approaches you asking for money.  They may have an elaborate story, involving a baby needing food or diapers, or a story about getting stranded in town, and needing carfare to get out of town.   There are multiple theories and ideas on what you should do.  Do you give them money, buy them food, call 911, ignore them, abuse them?  If you give them money, they will a) use it for food, b) use it to get high or drunk or both.  I am taking another approach.  I don’t care about them, in this instance, I care about you.  I care about your soul. Regardless of them and their possible or probable drug or alcohol addiction or not, what of you? The traveler lays stripped of clothing, beaten, and half dead along the road. Isn’t that what drug or alcohol addiction does to a person?  Wouldn’t homeless people fall into that category? So in relation to your soul, are you the priest or the Levite?  Do you walk on by down the road?  Who is your neighbor?  Maybe this is the prodigal son on that long journey back to his family.   Maybe this is Odysseus cast up naked and battered out of the sea, on that eternal Odyssey.  Who are you?  Frederick Douglas lived in my city.   Their are underground railroad stops near my house.  There are refugees trying to cross the ocean to get here, HERE.  Who are you? Are you a Levite, or are you from Samaria?

© words by Dan DeMarle 2017

The problem with how many people conceptualize God, is that they view God as an all powerful Father figure. As such this belief, absolves them from taking responsibility to clean up their own problems and to work on the very real problems facing the world. Because God will take care of it, judge it, solve it, and punish the evil and reward the good.  So they don’t have to.  My conceptualization of God, is very different. In mine, I am responsible for my own shit.  period. It’s me.  The world is a very different place, when you know you, not God, are responsible for it.

© words by Dan DeMarle 2017

There is a moment when the tide turns,

when the Rubicon is crossed,

when historians say the turning point was reached.

When does the End begin?

Is it when the last breath is breathed?

Is it when the first cancerous cell splits?

It is when the toxins first enter the system that cause the cancer to grow?

Today the end began.

The world took a huge lurch toward global warming.

Maybe we could have stopped it.

Maybe we still had time.

Maybe we had not yet reached the tipping point.

Today the end of America as a super power began.

Today we moved towards being just another struggling nation,

competing tooth and nail, like any bully standing on a street corner.

Today the beacon of hope went out.

We just have not realized it yet.

It is still day time, it is not yet night.

The body still breathes, and it will for sometime.

But the die was cast, and we lost.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 2017