Still crazy...

Because I write and say whatever comes to mind...
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Which is why I blog I guess - and may explain some of my more stupid comments.
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Anyway, this is one of those days I have nothing to blog about so I will write whatever comes to mind.
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Like Occupy Wall Street.  It still is on my mind despite the fact I don't really follow it except to defend people when they are called bottom-feeders and scum.  See, that bothers me because it means people who say such things imagine themselves better than those people.  We always act like the Pharisee in his attitude towards the publican when we do that stuff.  We are all going to die however.  I thought of that watching the video of Gaddafi's death - in fact I meditated it during my rosary considering the passion of Christ.  Christ was treated like the criminal dictator.  That is how low Christ humbled himself. 
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The poor you will always have with you.
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I watched a piece on ABCNews this past weekend about a doctor in Pittsburgh whose 'clients' are the homeless - he makes street calls for free, and sometimes helps the poor he encounters to get back on their feet.  I was deeply impressed.
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America has an article/report from a priest, pastor of a poor parish out east who has noted an increase in funerals at his church which he attributes it to health care - or the lack there of.  The poor and destitute seem to only go to the emergency rooms when they are ill, and without insurance, they have no preventative care.  The pastor attributes the increased deaths to a lack of health care.  "'There’s no preventative care,' he said. 'They go to the emergency department for treatment. They’re not getting adequate care. They don’t have money for medicine.... Most of them shouldn’t die. It’s the result of socio-economic issues,' he said."
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I believe it is true.
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People who have worked all of their life and seem to have everything they need or want - their retirement savings, including added benefits like health care, allowance for travel budgets, as well as money for gambling, dining out, and other entertainment, have a difficult time understanding these things.  Especially if they had been able to pull up their boot straps and become a self-made man, and found a way to live a safe distance from the urban poor and undesirables.
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Seeing Christ in the poor and disagreeable...

Knowing they ('men from the Bowery') were “living on relief in lodging houses or sleeping in doorways,” Dorothy writes, “they were as poor, as destitute, as ‘down and out' as man can get. And yet how close they are to our Lord!” “I felt Christ in that man beside me and I loved him.” Then she offers a brief meditation: “Every morning, I break my fast with the men in the breadline. Some of them speak to me. Many of them do not. But they know me and I know them. And there is a sense of comradeship there. We know each other in the breaking of bread.” (Feb 27, 1939)
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This meditation, re-phrased in the postscript to The Long Loneliness , signals the abiding importance for Dorothy of seeing Christ in the poor. But it was not easy. Later in the same entry, she writes “Today we had to send Mary O'Connor away to Bellevue. She had been with us since last April, almost a year.” Staying at the Worker helped her for a while, but lately “she had been keeping us up nights chasing imaginary pursuers with a broom . . . cleaning her room at two in the morning . . . attacking people, stepping on their feet, kicking them, spitting at them, throwing a plate with very poor aim. We took broom handle and scissors away from her.” (Feb. 27, 1939). A few months later, Day writes about a guest named Joe being drunk: “drunkenness and all the sins which follow in its wake are so obviously ugly and monstrous, and mean such unhappiness for the poor sinner that it is all the more important that we do not judge or condemn them.” (July 8, 1939) Not easy to see Christ in Mary and Joe. Not easy to see Christ in the families living nearby either: “I remember one family on the west side, a longshoreman who got only a day or so on the docks every few weeks. He drank, his wife drank, and their children were growing up disorderly and dishonest. . . . They sold the clothes they were given for liquor. We spent all one winter giving food and clothing to this family. It was indeed hard to see Christ in these poor.” (Jan 2, 1940) - A Review Essay: The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day

Photo: NYC Breadline, Catholic Worker