© Dan DeMarle 2017

© Dan DeMarle 2017

The truth is that you are living your life in an illusion.  Because you are healthy, and have some money, you assume it will continue as such. Because your parents are alive, because your children are doing well, because you are employed, you believe everything will continue as such. This is simply an illusion.  You are one wrong turn, one distracted driver, one hostile take over, one premature baby, one unplanned pregnancy, one small hole in the vascular system of your or a loved one’s brain, a few missed breathes from an entirely different life path.  Additionally you are one 100 year flood, one hurricane, one earthquake, one severe weather event away from potential disaster.  The doomsday clock is currently set at 2 1/2 minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has been since 1953.  If you were on the Titanic, you would be fighting to get on the life boats, and the ship would be rising up preparing to sink.  But we go on, in our illusion.  Well America, guess what, its time to wake up! Its time to burst that bubble, get out of that illusion, and get busy fixing the things that can be fixed, and coming up with solutions to fix the things that can’t be fixed.  Your illusion, and your stubbornness in refusing to open your eyes and to really see, is one of the reasons we are where we are. As Pogo famously said “I have met the enemy and he is us!”

© words by Dan DeMarle

© 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