The pictures today have nothing at all to do with the journal writing.  I got the San Diego Harbor pictures just before seven o'clock this morning.  I got the  Jimson Weed flower pictures on my way back from MOPA this afternoon around four forty-five. These beautiful toxic flowers are blooming on the north side of Camino del Rio South between Texas Street and Mission Center Road.  

UBIQUITY OF POVERTY… Rambling thoughts:

Así es la Vida… Sometimes it just bees like that…  人生はそのようです… Такова жизнь… 

So ist das Leben… Telle set la vie… Sådant är livet…  هذه هي الحيا…  It is what it is.

Yesterday over coffee, a friend said earnestly about something that is happening in the life of someone important to him, “It is what it is.” I’ve been thinking about it, and he’s right… profoundly right in the same sense that the grandmother of a woman with whom I worked years ago would say, “Sometimes it just bees like that,” when something happened that she couldn’t change… but saying it, believing it, doesn’t get us off the hook. “Asi es la Vida” or “Такова жизнь” doesn’t excuse me from active concern about people, especially children, living in poverty.

I was on my way back home from dropping my two Davids at the airport when I began to count the number of homeless people still sleeping in the nooks and crannies of San Diego and the panhandlers at intersections (one man near the harbor held up a small piece of cardboard with nothing printed on it)… and I tried to remember if I had ever seen panhandling or anyone sleeping on the street in the little Arkansas town where we lived before my parents moved to Live Oak, California… or if I had seen it on the trip across the country when I was twelve… or when I was a teenager in California. I remember hearing talk from my parents’ and grandparents’ generation about the “great depression” and about hobos who sometimes came to the front door to ask for food.  My family told those stories to emphasize that there was a time when extreme poverty was prevalent in America… as if that time of poverty was past and wouldn’t ever come again.  When I was a junior in high school, Mrs. Laney required her students to read The Grapes of Wrath, and later as a teacher I included Steinbeck’s epic novel and his Of Mice and Men on my reading list when I taught American Literature. Mrs. Laney wanted us to be aware that times had changed and that life could be good for anyone who worked. I’m trying to remember if I really believed we were safely past the time when some Americans would live in abject poverty.  I think I must have believed it at least for awhile.  The fact is, however, that poverty has never been gone for even a fraction of a generation in America.  The poorest Americans are now more visible than they have been in the recent past.  Perhaps a clearer way to say it is that the poorest Americans are now less invisible. 

I had a conversation today with someone who self identified as a conservative Christian, and he told me that I should believe the wisdom of his Holy Bible and relax… that nothing can be done to solve the problem of poverty.  He told me Jesus said there will always be poor people… that it would be foolish to believe poverty can be eradicated.  He said a government war on poverty would be against God’s will. I asked him if he believes his god has designed poverty into human cultural and economic systems and if poverty is with us by design, what might the purpose be. He referred me to the Gospel of Matthew, so I decided to check it out; and sure enough, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John have the Jesus in their stories telling people that there will always be poor people. Matthew has Jesus saying, “For you always have the poor with you; but you do not always have Me” (Matthew 26:11);  Mark says Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want.  But you will not always have me (Mark 14:7); and John says in chapter 12, verse 8, “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.” 

I personally refuse to believe that poverty is necessary to achieve any kind of moral and ethical balance in culture. I refuse to believe that poverty is in any way an appropriate punishment for anything.  Working the “poor will always be with you” bit into a Jesus story several decades after Jesus actually lived was probably an effort to relate his Jewish life to Jewish history. The story tellers obviously knew about Deuteronomy, Chapter 15, verse 11, and it made sense to have the Jesus they were describing work as much ancient wisdom into the story as possible; so they had Jesus repeat the words about the poor never ceasing to be in the land.   Deuteronomy, Chapter 15, verse 11: “For the poor will never cease to be in the land; therefore I command you, saying, ‘You shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy and poor in your land.” We can be grateful that they didn’t work some of the Leviticus sayings into the dialogues of Jesus.

Even though the writers of the Gospels focused mostly on kindness and love and reconciliation, some latter day revisionists, like the Westboro nincompoop pastor Fred Phelps, are busy trying to weave the Leviticus hate passages into the Jesus story.  Sadly, an alarmingly large percentage of people in fundamentalist America are believers in the angry, hateful god that Phelps describes. His followers (mostly members of his family) carry signs inspired by the Leviticus exhortations which they believe came directly from the god of the ancient Hebrews. Explicit instructions are given by the writer(s) of Leviticus, speaking with instructions from God, to put to death “a man who lies with another man as if she were a woman (both men must be executed), Leviticus 20:13; any person who curses his mother or father, Leviticus 20:9; a man who cheats on his wife, or vise versa (both the man and woman in either case must be killed), Leviticus 20:14; a man who sleeps with his wife and her mother shall be burned to death, Leviticus 20:14; a man who has sex with an animal (both the man and animal must be killed), Leviticus 20: 15-16; Psychics, and wizards must be stoned (Leviticus 20:27; any priests daughter who is a whore must be burned at the stake, Leviticus 12:9; anybody who curses or blasphemes God shall be stoned to death (apparently all the people in the community are required to participate), Leviticus 24:14-16. 

The guy with whom I spoke today… he wasn’t, by the way, the guy I saw yesterday rolling a cross around the Plaza de Panama; but he is a seemingly good soul, a kind person, someone who insists that “God is love” and that someday in the sweet by and by he will learn why God says there must be people who are poor… so he can justify his strong Bible-based objection to an American government’s war on poverty.  He needn’t worry.  If there is a war on poverty going on today, it seems clear that poverty is winning.