Good Morning, Vietnam remembering this day when Saigon fell to its people's leadership and purposes. Today marks a milestone since the dreaded French and the American military could not vanquish the spirit of the people prevailing in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and China. This episode taught us little about our Open Door policy and how limited the perspective was that we had a right to claim the resources of the earth.

We heard the president of this country reassert the value of the policy created in 1948 that we have a God given right to export our virtue to others abroad while exploiting their natural resources. The president couched his rhetoric in terms of the desire of all people to resist terrorism in all of its forms for the good of everyone.
By this he meant Americans but he did not stop with this. He added that the continued struggle of this nation against the rest of the world who do not follow our example must never stop. It is a modern day crusade, which is in the same location as the present strife. We created an unending nightmare for the citizens of several nations in the vicinity of the Fertile Crescent.

Iraq, he described as having abundant oil, not mincing any words about our claim to the resources of Iraq oil fields. Meanwhile people who interviewed him asked him whether there was any oil left on earth, and whether we needed to devote our attention to renewable sources of energy? His response was that we are developing ethanol, which the rest of the earth sees as destroying the earth for the purpose of driving on streets in America. Exactly what is expected by developing more sources of fuel when people are starving abroad? It did not seem to affect the mirthful demeanor of the president that the economy has tanked and he used words such as " we are facing tough times." For whom are these times difficult? More to the point, how is it our providence to deliberately increase our wealth at the expense of everyone who lives in poverty?

Reverend Wright unfortunately is correct when he says that we created the atmosphere of hatred that exists abroad. Barak Obama has no choice to follow a middle road through the maize of political turmoil, and yet, the truth of the argument sustained by Rev. Wright at the National Press Association luncheon was not mistaken in the refrain that we have no right to tell anyone how to practice their religion or how to live. The Chinese do not have the right to tell the sovereign nation of Tibet what to think and to jail thirty dissidents either.

What we have to do is stop desecrating the earth with machines and get back to the simple realities of respect and dignity for everyone or else disappear from the earth. There was one more comment of the president of note: "there are some who would have us retreat into isolation from the world." In many ways the world may be insisting that this is the best solution for the earth's problems.

Privacy at last in my shed in a cul de sac of thought
no matter what we have experienced we know that we are in charge in this solitary refuge.
No authority, and no one bad can intrude into our frontier
It is more hospitable with wild animals like me
I have spent a life time avoiding the people with uniforms who bet that you will use a key chain to beat someone or strangle
an innocent victim
All this time you have been alone you learned one thing resolutely, that no one can get inside and hurt you anymore.
You turn over and look to the wall of your hut, a tear appearing slightly and you bless the fact that only these memories inside your head can intrude upon this sanctuary.

"Where God Left His Shoes" is to be seen in a benefit to kick off the Project Homeless Connect this Wednesday May 7. There are expected to be 1,000 people in attendance at the Gates Concert Hall in the Newman Center for the Performing Arts at 7 p.m. The debut takes place on May 7.

The performance by a Latina family in New York City at Christmas is challenging for anyone expecting a neat, tight and pastoral ending. We are left with the impression that there is never a reason that a person who is homeless is without a safe, stable place to leave, for that matter never a child and especially a family either.

This compelling story looks at what a person is doing in a shelter attempting to survive those harsh realities of not being able to make ends meet. We have to ask again, "what does a family of hard working and earnest people do to deserve this situation?

When one investigates the story we come to see that over a million people in the city are living in hunger and despair, not knowing for sure where there lives will carry them? It is a sobering thought that throughout the world as we know it that children are born into the world without a chance to live according to the ancient values of respect, dignity and grace. Many teenagers are faced with stark realities, like the youth in Covenant House, the largest shelter program in the United States.

On the opposite end of the great divide there are now two shanty towns in Los Angeles, one for those who have left their homes and have no place to fend for themselves. These people had been used to living in a place of their own and now must resort to sharing their lives on the edge of the city. The other community has been living a thread bare existence for many eons and has been declared to be rid of harassment from the local municipality because these poor have no where decent to be housed. Their community is a growing source of alarm as they spring up from Maine to Georgia and from "sea to shining sea."

What will become of the America that we have fashioned on greed and principles of stark contrasts? As surely as those who have lost their housing in dark economic times of fore closure there are many who live in sumptuous splendor who never give the crisis a moment's thought. What is the real purpose of this schism? Can one say that truly, "the poor are but the jennies on whom the wealthy saddled the yoke of their comfort?

Unfortunately, there are many more likely people who are without adequate means for support in the present day and age. People are talking about the recession lingering long into the year ahead. More than ever before, the economy has fueled discussion about the quality of life. People are not able to take vacations. People are afraid of making large investments. The cost of everything means that the lowest tier of the public sector has less to spend and is less likely to be able to live according to the standards to which they have been accustomed throughout their lives.

Poorer people are joined by new shanty towns and spiraling costs that have made America more akin to what we thought of as a third world nation. Doctors Without Borders has been treating patients in America. Veterans Stand downs, which are one stop shopping for benefits, and services are more common in places like the University of Denver with Project Homeless Connect this May 9 at the Richey Center than ever before. Each time 1,0000 people are served another 1,000 springs forth to take their place.

All across the nation these day long events are scheduled for the homeless. Many people who attend the event live marginally and cannot afford a day's rent or the utilities that soar higher. Transportation and inflation are making those people receiving SSI or any disability benefit less likely to be able to make payments on necessities. The future for the baby boomer generation looks more desperate as population rates increase and the impact of dementia in its many forms means that more and more Americans have to be maintained by county managed care programs.

The net worth of Americans has not been able to meet the demands of inflation and therefore people have to live as though they were in a village, where they rely on public transportation, local food banks and walking. The use of bicycles has increased not for leisure but because it is the only affordable means of transportation. Food banks have seen a ten percent or larger increase in demand, while the supplies are generally running out. There is no public safety net for people with mental health, physical disabilities, long term care, behavioral health problems and any types of care that was considered usual and customary a year ago.

Take dental health care, a luxury for the poor, which is considered a mainstay of health care. One of the reasons for the use of Doctors Without Borders is the growing number of people without sufficient hygiene to care for their teeth, the result of which is that they are not able to eat.

If this seems extreme look at the increase of drugs to replace the medicine needed for chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. The cost of the use of medicines costing 1,000's of dollars a month is crippling the ability for poor people to take care of their conditions and increases stress and the effect of living in pain. Increased numbers people are treated for pain but if there is not a physician available in rural areas, or in urban areas where the people are destitute, then they have to seek alternative means of surviving.

Eating disorders, lack of adequate rest, increases in asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, heart disease, Alzheimer's, developmental disabilities, all have exacerbated the quality of life of more than a quarter of Americans. We are on the verge of an epidemic of marginal life that has been evident for generations among most minority people living on the edges of society. When we determine that we must focus on more and bigger, and forget those who cannot stand the pressure, are forgotten and are dismissed as being lazy, then we have acquiesced to the vicissitudes of frontier life where every one fends for themselves. Let us hope that by our faith and struggle to hold one another up we are resolved not to let this ubiquitous journey end in being desolate?

The Democratic National Convention will be a battle ground for the self-interests of the rich and powerful. They will rule the convention with an iron fist. The media spotlight will be controlled and the dissidents kept at a safe distance fom the main stage. America will see a convention which the Roman coliseum would have envied. The hardship of a growing number of this country's citizens will be a back drop to all of the hype about progress and how this country is the most powerful and elite nation in the world's history.

One of my best, life-long friends nearly lost her father this last week due to a heart attack. He is slowly recovering from the trauma and so is his family.
Any of you who understand the letters (M.I.) know that the heart is a muscle the size of a fist, which delivers fresh blood and removes toxins from the moment of conception until we die. It is the single greatest machine that exists anywhere. A portion of the heart can die, ischemia, and yet, the muscle can still function. The pace maker in the heart maintains a rhythm throughout your lifetime. This vital signal can be interrupted and then restored with mechanical cardio pulmonary resuscitation (C.P.R.), or by way of an automated external defibrillator, (A.E.D.). Either way the heart has everything for sustaining life. This is why so much poetry, romance and value is placed in this tiny muscle.

I have taught C.P.R. for thirty years, or since my three children were born, for the American Red Cross. Recently the American Heart Association changed the procedure for the administering of C.P.R., which relies on breathing into the mouth of the victim or the stoma and compressing the chest in an adult who is determined to be twelve years of age and older, 150 times in two minutes. The Heart Association determined that pressing down on the sternum or breastbone was more important than breathing into the person's mouth. They indicated that you could do without the breaths mainly because there is oxygen in the body and because the movement of the blood to restore oxygen to the brain and to remove wastes is more precious than mouth-to-mouth breathing.

In the time that I have been an instructor and offered these course in both Spanish and English, I have noticed one thing always, that no matter how many times I teach these life saving skills that I feel giddy and effected by strong emotions when it comes to speaking about and witnessing this life saving effort. What this says to me is that being on the cusp of life and changing the course of affairs of a vulnerable person assures that you are performing an every day miracle.

In light of the political mess that we face and the economic conditions of millions of people in this country, let alone the billions of people dying of starvations it makes life come down to an irreducible and finite meaning. I am thankful that my friend's father has been saved, but I am also reminded that we are all special. L'Hayim

What if women against all men declared war? Through the mayhem by all means of aggression the two sides focused on the devastation of all sides, dwellings, and environs? How would this horror proceed? What would be left for children and what would be left for the rebuilding of the world?

As the dust settled who would claim victory? How would the victor celebrate the spoils of war?

In these times of famine for those who have differences with us what are we doing for all of the earth's citizens? These people who stand on the brink of starvation are our kin. If in our irresolute folly we proceed to the natural end we will destroy everything. Is this our Armageddon? Is this our own creation and not an allegory of a fabled tale?

What have we achieved by being born to a man and a woman, who claim the responsibility of creation? We cannot continue to take "sides against a sea of troubles and by opposing them end them." The spirit of each being is in you and me. It is our responsibility to watch closely how we speak and what we think just as it is our responsibility to watch what we do, with malice toward no one.

What we need is limits on eating, consuming everything, new anything, producing waste, creating subdivisions of housing in no where, gobbling up our natural resources, trampling down the permafrost, spreading out further, leaving a mark in outer space, depleting the air, water, the quality of life to the point that everyone starves, but those in a few enclaves.

We are fretting about being green built, yet we are well beyond the outer limit of creating spaces for new people without any means of stopping the devastation.

What we have in our oceans is a vortex of waste, where a mixture of particles of both sand and plastic are found in irreducible blends on our beaches and in the microorganisms of the seas.

There is not any time to waste. Stop polluting the air, the ocean, the water, the ecosphere that has protected this planet since the earth began.

In every pristine recess and corner of our earth there is evident reason to end the living nightmare of our destruction. If it is not for us than for them, we must.

Gaps

Gaps in meaning and commitment, windy crags of desperation, loosening footing among boulders and falling down, clinging to a foothold, a fissure in the window of light that remains widening on the sunlit ledge above giving way underneath we plummet straight down among the deep ravine of desire and despair.

Should this be our destiny?

Last Supper

of anyone who is different as much as one accepts the pestilence to come of defense against the plague.

Our home is a place of strife, outside and in, among our neighbors.
we are stuck in this co-opted world as strangers who wince and send away the beggars teetering on the brink of doom.

welcoming divergent people is a real gift

accepting people who come to you who are far a field by the accepted conventions blasphemy.

Coming Home

A place of desperate nuisances on a lookout of lawless subjects

lost in their memories of a home of their own.

A Diamond Jubilee

Do not come down this gauntlet

sorrow is ever persistent and

there is much to commend the struggle for justice for those who are survivors.

Creative Demise

Moving about how they play out these metaphysical conceits looking for the best proponent of one's inner life, which revels in, conspicuous nothing.

Missing the mark, while loosening the tether of martyrdom, some hasten to break completely

leaving our race mincing for words that register with another perhaps,

but never with this gaunt audience of entertainers.

Dysfunction

the gift which makes life measured and the most insignificant essential.

Two members of this community were murdered trying to avoid the inevitable predicament of choice of being shunned

Some say that it is their fault, that their paltry worth was nothing, nothing more than a for shortened life

Expedient and a plague of refuse

But for them, and you it was time they sought a refuge, never found until

They are interested in other ways of doing right, of being on time, correct? The choice of this wagon train looks away when you come near.

See that far off vision unlimited by because

we shunned the power vested in authority and might by virtue,

being divergent does have reason after all.

Although we are in the darkness to you, we are in the light and the way is the open hand.

Be Still

Compose yourself forget the pain of indifference and benign neglect

because you run upstream against the channel out of the water leaping over the chute

listen to the value that you speak too much, out of form, with impudence, arrogance and strife.

People around you never listen, are offended and turn away disturbed.

Covenant

Party on until the ultimate

Bewail the loss of senses or no.

What one feels is surreal, cruel and unwise

There is nothing one can do to escape the mess

Menacing skater, the careless indiscretion of fleeting pond lilies

immersing the ineffective trips the innocent and gasping for last breaths dissipates in the tow.

For all of those who long for safety, quiet, a friend, for all those afflicted, without a place to rest, may there be a companion, friendly face, who gathers you in one tender embrace.

Without the gulls shrill cries there was no where else to go

everything paved a rebuttal of what was calm and there was no sanctuary left or peace of mind. Growing old one hopes, in turn the poaching marauder will retrieve the peace and somehow there will be a mark of divine inspired intervening and at last one can smell the scent of being home at last, firmly snug in warm and everlasting rest.

Softly loving embrace, kind gentle saint of a gentle pulse loving without end until at last tasting the night of the sighing gift of where this unquenched design had flown.

The harsh rasp of a cracking, rattling rasp in the throat down deep where the dove has gone low down and rose again carrying aloft my soul.

One wondered in the din whether others knew how harsh life was inside this room? If anyone perceiving the heartache palpitated this pulse?

It is difficult to diagnose a person who is trapped within a nightmare of terror, difficult to know when outbreaks will squash one's thirst to see, and how far away and if any where is safe from the tremors trembling and tumbling visions

When a child captured the sun, father cradled him in his arms tenderly rocked away the storms and chased away the sepulcher of doubt furrowed on highbrow.

One remembers the kindness in his countenance and surrender to his benevolent smell.

Regarding him with truth unrepentant

He never asked, whether this child was right or wrong or cared indiscriminately

His poise and gait are still resolutely within grasp.

If only these memories of all the suffering, losses, trials and retributions subside

If only the peace at dawn survived?

Murmuring Whispers

Murmuring whispers elide in a sea of choruses, of croaking voices rising in a cacophony like the burrowing spine of a stingray paralyzing the consciousness of safe havens.

All one can do is lift the bewildering stare to heaven, stir a cupped hand to the mouth and ears, roll over and disintegrate

Lying down does not dissipate the dissident voices, looking for a sympathetic heart.

One stands in the doorway of the threshold half in and out waiting for the simmering dawn.

The stillness in the air is fractured first, then pierced by maddening screams of seagulls screeching overhead urged on in the broken day.

Temperatures, like tremors arose pounding out a beat of dread.

Could this traumatic movement in any way be subdued?

Could circumstances restore the peace, which had been given up and lost as the cool dawn turned?

Asleep were visions of slumbering daughters and my son, who counted on a stable place for life's measured sustenance.

Fretting that they awaken to find this madness and recoil. As if in fact that reaction has happened, one shuns a deeper sense of sparks flickering and dying within.

Mountain Morning

flowing fern breeze spinning morning spinning empty divine wind clearing the horizon from view

proving conjunctive relief of the sacred feminine

covering all of us with a mantle of expectancy

cloaking the crevasses with passionate rhapsody

the passionate embrace of a painful birth

reborn in the shattering ages now gone in a burning tempest, a burning wind burnishes the blind despised by all of the dwellings here who are orphaned and open to the wind swept plains of our torn hearts

blowing in this empty expanse of landscapes to the sea, as low and bitter as a salt pillar, devoid of sustenance and relief

we are spent

Only hope can shatter this once reemerging dream of a simmering dawn and escape the maelstrom of destiny.

Tomorrow comes without a safeplace Saving lives is like acceding to the demands of the carefree and caressing the toes of the wrinkled surviving carriers is sensing that there is a destiny which leaves us gasping for air, without memory

What is beauty?

in the nuptials of feeling consciousness, being alive and something that would be everything and in every place of homestead and hearth of brave spirits.

In the rev of engines and the exhaust, in the cost of unbridled things and ceilings that offer a wide view.

One feels the sense of being alive, at home, safe and at peace. There is in this version a place for every heart. And the divine presence in every one, however limited.

This blog’s focus is people's commitment to the next generation. How can we preserve the world spiritually and personally? This is a conversation in the words of Dr. Vincent Harding, of how “we are responding to the places we have been and what we can do together.”

Randle Loeb was a chaplain in the Colorado House of Representatives during the 2008 session. He has been an advocate on homeless issues for about 10 years, and is a leading member of Denver’s Capitol Hill community. He edited the Denver Homeless Voice and currently edits the Ploughshare, the newsletter of the First Unitarian Society of Denver.

Personal note:
“My work began as a result of being homeless and recovering from a bipolar disorder that nearly took his life in 2001. I lived on the streets of Denver in the late ‘90s and stayed often on porches, in backyards, sheds and gardens where I worked as a caretaker. Finally, in 2004, the St. Paul United Methodist Church hired me as a caretaker and I have lived there ever since.
“I have three grown children, six grandchildren and my family is from San Sebastian, Puerto Rico. My family all resides in Philadelphia. My mother lives in the community where I grew up in Wyncote, Pa.”