Voting and Loving

Standing in the line to vote, I’d brought my rolling walker with a seat to use if standing long brought on pain. Three different poll workers kindly asked if I’d like to go to the front of the line. I said no, because I could sit down any time I needed to. They noticed the woman behind me with a bandaged foot and asked her the same. She also said no, there were chairs every six feet. She and I began to chat about the challenges of aging and life in general right now. She shared some difficulties, but then recounted with a light in her eyes how they had turned out to bring about some good changes in her life. I reacted with delight, recognizing grace and a faith we shared. We bonded there in a line, six feet apart, with masks. It was one of those blessed moments of connection. We parted reluctantly after voting and as I drove away I realized from other things that she had probably voted red, while I voted blue. But I also realized that she went back to her life reaching out in love to those familiar faces whom she understood and trusted, while I went back to reaching out to unfamiliar faces, with lives so different from mine. Both of us doing our best to help others and to share the faith that saw us through the hard times.

The problem with a political solution is that it doesn’t take into account that we are born with very different personalities. And though as we grow through stages of life, we can become stronger in undeveloped aspects of our personality, there’s a timing to the process that isn’t under our control.

I once wrote an article called Aliens in the Nest after recognizing how different I was from either of my parents and how different my five children were from one another and at least one of us, their parents.

It takes grace to love across these differences. It takes both time and grace to develop strengths in our weaknesses. What we can handle with the grace of faith now would not have been possible for us at an earlier stage of our personal spiritual development. God gives us grace for the moment.

We cannot force others to be where we are. I keep coming back to the importance of realizing with heart and mind that I and all others are loved completely at our worst, but are also still unfinished at our best. Legislating for others, no matter how strongly we feel and even if we ourselves would with grace be willing to sacrifice our own life for what we believe, doesn’t work. Our call is to help others find that love that frees us all to grow and risk and accept suffering and die knowing we were loved at each stage of our journey.

Of Cabbages and Kings

OK, who has actual numbers, countries, conditions that precipitated such a sudden increase in immigrants? What is the current number,condition, and plan for immigrants in custody.
Who has an itemized list of symptoms of climate change beyond normal vacillations in weather over a couple of centuries? Anyone know of charts imaging the extent of changes?                            Who reads the Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post , The Atlantic, and watches PBS and Fox News?

The time has come the Walrus said, to speak of many things! But unless we have some facts that we can trust, we will be ruled by dictators or kings. And even if you like the first, there’s no guarantee you will like those who follow, and we will no longer have a choice.

Anger, antagonism, name calling, ridicule, do not convince anyone.  I’m open to facts with sources and numbers with names.  I’d like to hear from people who actually read and analyze sources on opposite sides.

I admit that I became an ostrich once politics turned into mud throwing.  I don’t know where to begin now, so am open to help.

The Homeless and The Immigrants

People are homeless for diverse reasons. One major one is that the pay for unskilled work will not support even one person. In our rural county we have 200 children in our school system who are homeless. Some are actually living in cars, others in homeless camps in the woods, and whole families are living in one room in cheap motels. Some are going from friend to friend for shelter. A cheap hotel may only charge $35 a night, but for a month that comes to $1,050. For many that’s disability or social security pay for a month with little or nothing left over for food, clothes, transportation, or medical expenses. Federal and Tennessee minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. A forty hour week for four weeks earns $1,160. Once you no longer have good credit, the motel is your best option because you don’t need a month’s rent and utilities’ deposits. However, you have no refrigerator or stove and cannot legally use a burner because of fire codes. You can’t afford to use a laundromat, so you are hand washing clothes in the tub and drying them on the shower rail. If you do not have a car or it breaks down, you walk to your $7.25 an hour job in all kinds of weather. In our town, the industrial park is nowhere near the cheap motels. Since personnel directors can now go to jail for hiring illegals, most of our industries struggle to keep their shifts fully employed. Only large cities have public transportation.
We are now serving meals in the summer in the schools, the public library, and the projects, and I believe they are working on using school buses to bring children to the schools to eat. But budgets are strained. Public housing in some cities have waiting lists up to a year.
Other reasons for a large percentage of people being homeless are alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, mental and physical disability, old age, and veterans with PTSD. Most of these people are unemployable with very little possibility of ever becoming self sufficient.
Almost all of our churches, the YMCA, government agencies, and other charities are involved in some way with feeding, housing, clothing, and transporting the homeless. The problems are almost insurmountable. One charity has been working for six years to acquire a building to house families, do drug testing, provide child care, and job training with the goal of helping them become self sufficient. Over and over the codes and the local government have blocked their acquiring suitable buildings because citizens in the area protested. My husband had volunteered free architectural services for remodeling. This was not meant to be just a vagrant shelter. One large building, that they had tried to acquire, which had first been a hospital and then a drug rehab center, has now become uninhabitable from roof leaks, mold, and lack of care.
A large church here does have a house for men and a house for women with drug testing and job training and strict standards and oversight. But, when they wanted to use their much larger church facility for Room at the Inn during winter months, codes and citizen protest defeated this effort.
Churches offering meals have small response even when offering van transportation, because the homeless have acquired survival items too bulky to transport and unsafe to leave unprotected. Also, in the camps, personal spaces can be lost if not occupied. The local YMCA offering a warming station on below freezing nights had a very small response for the same reason. Food trucks are a workable solution to feeding, but are very expensive, requiring committed personnel along with liability insurance and maintenance costs.
I know first hand from friends who are personnel directors doing the hiring for industries, that in the past, many, if not most, legal and illegal immigrants were employable, hard working, often working two jobs, willing to go through all sorts of discomfort to get to a job site to be dependable. They also formed communities that helped one another. I assume some of those seeking asylum may not be like that, but in the past many have been. They are not homeless for the same reasons as many of our home grown homeless. They are seeking a better life.  A very large percentage of our homeless are either unable to work or have succumbed to escapes from pain.

Post Script:

After listening to what passes for discussion on political issues,  I have realized that there really isn’t any point in even discussing things like immigration, homelessness, war to protect oil sources, or Health Care, across party lines, because they all come back to money. The poor on welfare, we call lazy. But we won’t tax the billionaires, who don’t pay their workers enough to live on. Capitalism and Democracy have long been bed partners. But they are not Siamese Twins. They can be separated. And Christianity has persevered under all types of governments, even hostile ones. It’s time to admit that unfettered Capitalism is simply licensed greed.