(00:00:00) I appreciate you all being here. Although it's pretty cold outside and I'm not sure who else you'd be going right now. Actually, I spoke to Steve a couple of days ago, and he told me that it was snowing lightly and it was real cold and I was kind of looking forward to that because in Washington winter arrives pretty late it arrives, but it comes late and so I was I got on the plane with Mixed emotions and expectations because I thought it was going to be all bitterly cold and I never dressed properly for it and I got off the plane and it was about the same temperature as it wasn't Washington. But it looks (00:00:43) different (00:00:45) it does when you fly into different parts of the country, you can immediately tell where you are. If you're in the midwest, it's just flat just goes on forever when you get to California. It's obvious and I hadn't been to Duluth before but when you come out of the clouds, you know that you're in the North Country. It's very impressive. I do appreciate the invitation and your presence here. I think it's Steve's suggestion is a very good one and that is that if people can for a very short time try and set aside most of the suppositions and assumptions. On which you base your lives it would make easier. are communicating all I will share with you tonight is what I and we we as a community have seen and heard and the knowledge that flows out of what we've seen and heard so in a sense, I'm just reporting. but what we see is determined to a great extent by where we stand and by with whom we choose to stand and so our view of our society and the world is probably somewhat different than most other people's now having said all of that it would probably be helpful to just share briefly with you where I come from. Steve has already spoken someone about the community for Creative non-violence. I have been part of that group for about 14 years. Although the community was in existence when I got to Washington it came together in 1970 in response to the war in Vietnam and We are essentially a religious community. Although religious belief is never been a prerequisite for membership and the shape or form of religious expression is never been very tightly defined we have and have had Christians Jews Buddhists Hindus don't think we've ever had any Muslims we've had Muslims but a pretty wide variety of people coming as Steve said from a pretty wide variety of backgrounds. Our community is non-hierarchical. Our decisions are made consensually. There's nobody in charge of the community. There are probably 50 or 60 of us that comprise what we call ccnv the community for Creative non-violence and each person brings different gifts and different skills. And so leadership is displayed in different ways by different people, but it's not a structured way of either making decisions or living and working. None of us and I guess there's about 50 or 60 of us. None of us receives a salary we get the clothing is donated we wears as well as we pass on to the people that we serve. There's no shortage of food. This is a very wealthy country. Most of our food comes out of the trash or its food that would otherwise be discarded and we are able to feed ourselves and about a thousand or so other people had a with it. as I said, we initially came into existence in response to the war in Vietnam, but within two years we understood that there was a domestic counterpart to the violence of Southeast Asia and for us that was most clearly manifested in the existence within just a couple of blocks of the White House of people who were forced to go to bed hungry at night and there were and in fact are still people immediately around the White House who have no bed to go to Out back in 1972 when we began to understand that we opened up a soup kitchen and served about a hundred and fifty to two hundred people a day with the opening of that soup kitchen. We began to work more closely with and serve the poor and the destitute and to Advocate on their behalf. Back in 72 when we opened up. The kitchen is I say we served about 200 people a day, but we fairly quickly came to understand that the person who comes in for a bowl of soup is also someone who brings with them a myriad of other needs. Need for shelter the need for clothing the need for medical care, they need for legal assistance because when you're destitute and living on the fringes of our society virtually by definition you are illegal urinating in public is against the law drinking in public is against the law many things that if you live indoors you take for granted are in fact illegal activities if you're out of doors, and if you don't have any indoors to go to you break the law just about all the time. Now we serve somewhere around two to two and a half thousand people a day with food Medical Care clothing shelter and a variety of other services. We ask nothing of the people we serve we don't take names. We don't require anything of them because as a community, we don't dispense charity matter of fact, we despise charity as the term is used the illogically and in the Bible, we feel fine about that as it's used in our society. We don't what we're about is Justice. My belief is that every human being by virtue of their birth and the humanity has an absolute right to all of the necessities of life in any civilized society and any civilized group of people must recognize that must act on that recognition. In December 1976. We opened our own home to people on the street by home. I mean our community house where the staff lived we had developed a tradition within ccnv of opening the soup kitchen through the night on Christmas Eve because that's a nice way to spend Christmas Eve. It's it's appropriate. It's relevant. It feels good in 76. He was a quiet night in just a few people that come in and some of us were sitting up through the night and talking and the question was raised. I'll come just Christmas Eve. What about the 25th and the 26th and what about January and February valid questions. The question that was being asked is why didn't we do this every night and why didn't we do what we had to do in order to guarantee that people had a place to come into every night and not just on Christmas. And so that question was brought back to the community and within a few nights we started driving around. And can looking for homeless people and began bringing them into that building which housed about 20 or 25 staff people 11 black students who had been thrown out of a Southern College for being too radical the family of 15 and had been evicted from the apartment that they were living in because the landlord wanted to tear the building down and needed to get rid of them. So we when we opened up our building we had about 40 or 50 people living there. It was an 8 bedroom house. So it was fairly tight. But by the fourth night after we made that decision, we also had 40 people sleeping on the living room floor and in the dining room and just stretching from one end of the first floor to the other. When we did that we began in Earnest the task of what we articulated a couple of weeks later of securing adequate and accessible space for every man woman and child in America offered in an atmosphere of reasonable dignity to those who wanted to come in off the streets and we first made a commitment to begin that process in Washington and then as quickly as possible to expand that process to the rest of the country believing that it was an absolute necessity for we as a people as a nation to do what needed to be done in order to guarantee that people would have a roof over their head. Now. We didn't find a tremendous amount of sympathy or support back in 1976 for the idea that either every human being by virtue of their birth has a right to shelter and that we as citizens have an absolute responsibility to provide it. what we found instead was a great deal of ignorance and fear, which is I'm sure you understand our themselves products of distance the very awesome distance between those who have someplace to lay their head at night and those who don't what we found was that the homeless were and to a pretty great extent still are essentially missing persons absent from our deliberations our decision-making processes our Consciousness in our lives and so daily in vitreous misery, they suffer and they die now in order to reduce that distance and overcome some of that ignorance some of that fear we understood that we needed to speak symbolically and dramatically and prophetically and so we did things like breaking down doors and government buildings and literally taking them over after requesting the use of those buildings and having been denied them. We occupied government buildings and buildings that were owned by people in the private sector and just turn them into shelters. We erected 10 cities and serve Thanksgiving dinner in Lafayette Park both of those things in Lafayette Park, which is directly across the street from the White House. We poured blood Our own on government buildings and in one instance on the altar of the cathedral to try and make visible and concrete what what was in fact the results of indifference and in action, we conducted public funerals for the same reason remember a few years back one of them received a lot of attention the friend of ours fella named Jesse Carpenter had been a World War Two hero died across the street from the White House. He died because his friend man named John lamb was in a wheelchair and there was no shelter in Washington that could accommodate a wheelchair. And so Jesse stayed with John through a cold night and wond a freezing to death at his feet and John actually two months later fell out of his chair and smashed his skull and died, but we had a very large funeral for Jesse and Arlington Cemetery. And there were literally hundreds of press people there because it had never occurred to anyone that folks who lived and died on the streets were in fact real live human beings with histories and with identities and personalities and names and faces and we did those kinds of things all of those things for essentially the same reason that was to raise invisibility and to begin to focus attention on a group of people who were for all intent and purposes non-existent pleasure. We also were dragged out of cathedrals on other occasions. When we dared to suggest that the religious community the church had no right to close its doors after the last Mass while people were outside freezing to death Church officials promptly called the police and an abstract away. We spent time on the street as has been said some of us fasted and We spent time in jail. Now we did all of those things as I said to begin to help other people understand what was and is going on at their feet and to begin to reduce some of that distance between those who have both the means and the ability of the resources to do something about the problem and those who are who are out there with no place to go. Now. None of those things made us particularly popular. As a matter of fact, we were very unpopular and probably still are with some people but that is in part because there is a tendency to equate the message in the messenger and you know, they used to do that in ancient Rome and in Greece if somebody brought a very unpleasant message, they kill them the Hope was that in eliminating the messenger the message might go away as well. It didn't work very well then and it doesn't work very well now but that process still goes on. And so we found ourselves making a great many people angry and defensive and uncomfortable. But at the same time we also discovered that people were beginning to to understand better. What was happening very haltingly and very grudgingly Americans began to see they began to see the homeless and many saw them for the first time even though they might have been walking past them or stepping over them for years. They didn't see them on the levels that count. It didn't register. And what what also began to occur at the same time was that all of the comfortable and familiar? Old stereotypes and images began to crumble and die because while they may be old and familiar, they're not particularly accurate people are not on the streets primarily because their alcoholic and they're certainly not out on the streets because they're quote dirty lazy drunken bums unquote. It's a comfortable idea mean it certainly allows people to go to bed at night and Get into their warm beds and sleep under a nice roof a little easier believing that folks are out there because they wish to be or because they really aren't willing to play the game, but that's not true. It hasn't been true if ever it was for a very long time. And so once those stereotypes and images began to crumble, we as a people began to comprehend more clearly both the diversity of the people of the street and the magnitude of the problem now, that's that's a good thing. It's good that there's more attention than focused and more people have gotten concerned and involved but it's also true that at the same time. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people who are out there. There are many many many more people on the street now than there were six or seven years ago to matter of fact every year every month just about every day. There's more people out on the street. And so the question of whether our Consciousness and our concern in our activity is even keeping Pace with a number of people that wind up out on the street in addition to those who are already out. There is an open question. Now what that increase in numbers means taken out of the abstract and the statistical is more pain and loneliness more frostbite and gangrene more limbs lost because of that more than ammonia more illnesses and injuries of every kind both exposure related and simply a product of the vulnerability of living on the streets. And of course, there are many more needless deaths many many people in America freeze to death as a result of their homelessness. Now I'm I'm both by birth and upbringing and by inclination. I think a New Yorker and I have a brief reading that I'd like to share with you. It was written about New York by a fellow named Thomas Wolfe who's a very very fine writer was written during the Great Depression a little more than 50 years ago. I'd like to like to share that with you. It was his custom almost every night at one o'clock or later to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and night after night with a horrible Fascination. He used to go to the public latrine or Comfort station, which is directly in front of the New York City Hall. Excuse me, one descended to this place down a steep flight of stairs from the street and on bitter nights. He would find the place crowded with homeless men who had sought Refuge there here in New York in this obscene meeting place. These derelicts came drawn into a common stew of rest and warmth and a little surcease from their desperation. George had never before witnessed anything to equal the indignity and the sheer animal horror of the scene. There was even a kind of Devil's comedy in the sight of all these filthy men squatting upon those opened or loose stools the site was revolting disgusting enough to render a person forever speechless with pity the Woolworth Building was not 50 yards away and a little further down with a silvery spires and needles of Wall Street Great fortresses of stone and steel that housed enormous Banks the blind Injustice of this contrast seemed the most brutal part of the whole experience for their all around him in the cold Moonlight only a few blocks away from this abyss of human wretchedness and misery Blaze the Pinnacles of power where a large portion of the entire world's wealth was locked in Mighty volts. Now Wolfe wrote those words now just about 56 years ago yet when I moved to the streets for four months in the winter of 1980. I found it almost nothing had changed for four months. I lived on a little bit about four four by four by four foot slab of Steel that is called a heat great. There's underground heating systems that provide heat to all of the federal buildings in downtown Washington. And in order to allow the steam to escape there are these steel grates all over the downtown area and all of them are fully occupied soon as the weather begins to turn cool occasionally, very late at night. I would leave that great and I would walk to the only public restroom in Washington. It's open through the night. It's one near the Washington Monument. I found in that bathroom in 1980 would wolf had found in New York in 1930 through the Pinnacles of wealth had been replaced by the trappings of political power. essentially the power of Empire but the contradiction that I found just as the contradiction that will found remains essentially the same and the contradiction is this this is the wealthiest Nation the Earth has ever seen and within our country. There are somewhere around two to three million human beings people just like you and I was only common Bond or crime is that they are somehow either temporarily or permanently disabled and that they are eating out of garbage pails and living and dying on the streets essentially like animals. Now obviously I think we can conclude by that from that that something is wrong. And I think that particularly in places like this college has a great deal of time and energy is spent discussing and Discerning the root causes of poverty and Injustice. But I also think that what we tend to refer to as roots are in fact only the branches. The underlying truth you see with which we must at some point regardless of how reluctant we may be. Come to grips with is that neither the existence of millions of people at our feet nor the other manifestations of violence are Injustice within our society or temporary aberrations. they are in fact The Logical predictable and inexorable consequence of our very strenuous efforts to build a livable Society on a foundation of competition and individualism and rampant greed It is an irrational inhuman and dangerous set of assumptions on which we have not surprisingly managed to construct an irrational in human and extremely dangerous world. Now. It also seems to me that we have to begin to face facts and one of the facts is that we can not fine-tune either our institutions or our relationships or our values and make them sufficiently better because regardless of how much formaldehyde you pump into a dead body. It's going to remain dead and it's going to continue to deteriorate and it's going to stink. Now it also seems to me that there are some things that each of us regardless of the very unique nature of our gifts and our abilities and I think we can all agree that every human being is unique and every human being brings with them a different set of pluses and minuses but agreeing on that and setting that aside I think that we can also say or should say that regardless of that uniqueness. There are some things that are common to all of us and there are some things that all of us must do if we're to have any hope of creating a livable and a just and Equitable world or even maintaining this one in any kind of workable shape for the foreseeable future. The first thing I think that we need to do is to begin to really seriously acknowledged by the way, we live that a there is a just and loving God be that all of us are members equal members of the human community and that the human Community is but a very small part of a very large and beautiful creation and that anything that disrupts or denies that Unity is wrong and evil and has to be opposed and rejected anything that supports and Embraces and propagates. That Unity needs to be embodied pursued and accepted. We also have to begin to Break Down The Walls and the multitudinous layers of bureaucracy. And racism and sexism and elitism and all the other isms that manage to separate us from one another. And they managed to insulate and isolate and segregate us from one another because the truth is that we're only willing to abide evils like homelessness and hunger because they have not yet begun to touch us at least not where it counts not in the depths of our relationships and most certainly not in our own flesh. What that means again concretely and out of the abstract is that we are supposed to act as though the person sitting out in the street. Or walking with their belongings in plastic bags or huddling in the cold. We're supposed to act as though that person is our sister or brother our mother or father or our son and daughter or we ourselves because that in fact is precisely what that person is. and it also seems to me that were called on to act in ways that are both responsible and proportionate and what I mean by proportionate is this assume for a moment that tonight Turn on the television or listening to the radio or tomorrow morning. We read in the paper that in New York City tonight, 25 to 50 thousand people were driven out of their homes because of a fire or a flood or an earthquake. What do you think would be the response today? I'll tell you what the response would be. The governor and the mayor of New York would declare a state of emergency the Red Cross and the Salvation army and United Way and lots of others would rush in personnel and supplies school buildings and churches with throw open their doors and people would do anything and everything they had to do to guarantee that those 25 or 30,000 people had a roof over their head and that they continue to have a roof over their head and that provision be made so that they would have someplace permanent to go back to and yet tonight. There are a minimum of 60 thousand people on the streets of New York. Most of them are children more children. I'm told and were on the streets of Dresden after the fire bombing in World War Two And yet what's the response? No state of emergency. No Red Cross and Salvation Army a handful of churches are thrown open their doors. What difference do you think it makes to someone on the streets of New York? What Duluth or anywhere else if they got there because of fire or earthquake or flood or because of unemployment but because of mental disability or because of old age because of physical disability. The answer is it makes absolutely no difference at all. The only people that it seems to make some difference to those who have the ability as well as the responsibility to do something about it and for some reason don't Now you can also carry that one step further and make it a little more immediate. What do you think would happen if while I stood here speaking smoke started to curl in under that screen and under the doors and Flame started to lick at the walls. How many of you think that we would hold a meeting to discuss what to do? Hi, we wouldn't do that because that would be an irrational response. Right we get out of this building as quickly as we could. Hopefully we would do it with some respect and regard for others, but given past experience. I doubt it folks would start screaming and yelling and dragging other people out of the way just to get to the door. (00:28:06) That (00:28:07) is a rational response not necessarily screaming and yelling and dragging people out of our way. But trying to get out of a burning building makes a great deal of sense. Yet look at how we respond not only to the existence of millions of people at our feet but to the threat of nuclear annihilation. So the fact that every minute on this planet 43 people starve to death most of them children under five who have harmed absolutely nobody and look at how we respond to the rape and the destruction of our environment our ecology the rail and air and water on which we rely for our continued existence. Our response is neither rational nor proportionate. And the question is of course why? There are in fact, I'm sure many answers to that question but one that we have identified. is is this every year and it's coming up now in a couple of weeks we have this holiday that we call Thanksgiving and it's a time of year when we give we give thanks and we Mark the bountifulness of our nation we come together to To count our blessings and to give thanks for our abundance. It may well be and probably almost certainly is that that abundance That We Gather to give thanks to is in fact driving a stark raving mad. A few you actually a number of years back. I saw a documentary on public television. I believe it was it was about great apes. It was put together by a number of anthropologist and they went to wherever you go to to study great apes and they put on this hour-long Show and The Grapes great apes grapes Cesar Chavez is coming to Morrison have grapes in my head. Great apes as you probably know or some of you know live in families or tribes. There are a number of young number of females one dominant male the male is the forager. He goes out and gets the food brings it back. He gets his share the females get there as the young get there's it's distributed intuitively, very reasonably each member of the tribe essentially gets what they should get given their body weight and given the energy that they expend. What these Anthropologist discovered again? And again, the response was always almost always the same actually always the same was that when they put the mail to sleep and allowed him to wake up next to or on top of a couple of thousand pounds of bananas. He always acted the same way. He got incredibly aggressive became very violent and apes are not normally very violent and they got a really bad rap out of Hollywood, but they happen to be very civilized creatures, they're vegetarians and they don't hurt other creatures needlessly at all. But under that condition the mail went berserk and he would try and hurt and would have in fact inflicted heavy damage to any of the other tribe members if they didn't back away and he kept them at Bay and never once did the mail eat any of the bananas. He just sat there on top of his huge pile of bananas defending them and never enjoying them every time they put him back to sleep and allowed him to wake up with a bunch of bananas by his side. Instantly the change occurred. He took his share everybody else got their share what the Anthropologist concluded was that apes are incapable of dealing with excess makes him crazy drives him Stark raving mad. Now the next time you walk into a large Supermarket, you take a good look around and you start thinking about bananas for a moment. You'll have some understanding of what we managed to do to ourselves by creating this monstrous pile of bananas that were firmly ensconced on top of Keeping It Bae everything and everyone that would try and take some we don't even seem to be enjoying them anymore. (00:32:33) Now (00:32:34) it also seems to me that if we are to have any chance or hope of survival as a community even as a planet, we have to begin to understand and come to grips with the nature of change. now Steve mentioned that in 1984 some of us fasted for 51 days, which we did and there was a lot of publicity that surrounded that lots of calls came in in the weeks after that fast ended which was actually two years ago last night. One of the calls came from a man in Denver who called up and said not to originally hi. I'm a man from Denver and I'd like to talk with you. And he said I am the director of a very large foundation and we discovered afterwards that it was in fact, it is a very large foundation with lots and lots of money. He said one of it's a family foundation and one of the principles one of the family members is in Washington and she works for a senator and she very much likes the work that you all do and she wants to give you money and she has discretionary funds which she can just give away on her own and it's quite a significant amount and we would like to give you some money and I said, well that's good because we can use some money. So why don't you send it down? And he said well no, I I'd like to come and talk with you. And so we arranged for him to come in a couple of weeks and he did and he and I met on the steps of the very large shelter that we operate in downtown Washington and he showed up about 15 minutes before this woman this principle in the foundation the family member. Came and we were chatting and then it occurred to me that I should I should point something out to him. And I said by the way, I should tell you this, but we're not tax exempt. And he looked at me very strangely. And he said what do you mean I said just what I said, we're not tax exempt and he said oh, well, we can help you become tax exempt I said listen, we're 15 years old. If we wanted to be tax-exempt we figured out a long time ago how to do it. We don't choose to do that. He said well, then we can funnel the money through another group, and I said no, If we're willing to funneling money through another group, we would do it ourselves. We just that's not something we choose a wish to do. And he got very very upset very agitated. He started literally turning colors and I expected at any moment to see a little puddle began to form at his feet. Like I was extremely upset and he stood there shaking his finger in my face (00:35:26) and he just (00:35:29) kept yelling and making more and more noise. And finally I said, what's the matter? Why are you getting so upset? So I Choice your money. There's no problem, you know show you around the shelter and no hard feelings, and he said I used to be like you Now I was taking a bit of back by that. I didn't know what he was talking about (00:35:49) because (00:35:51) I didn't know whether he used to wear green jackets or what the situation was, but he said he said I used to be a radical and I said and I shouldn't have said this. I know I said what happened (00:36:03) and (00:36:06) that didn't lighten the atmosphere anyway, and he didn't improve the situation a whole lot. But he said, yeah, I used to be just like you and the 60s. And I said, well what really what happened? And he said I learned I said, what'd you learn? He said I learned that if you want to get anything done in this world, you got to compromise. I was getting him very upset obviously because we wouldn't compromise. Do you see the man from Denver was wrong dead wrong completely absolutely wrong. There wasn't a stitch a truth in what he said. It's just that he didn't feel comfortable in my presence and the presence of other people in the community Because deep down inside. He probably understands that it's only when you stop compromising and stop trampling on values and principles that you ever get anything done. Absolutely nothing occurs when human beings compromise themselves, it's as though we've created a society in which little children are taught that when they become mature and adult they will have learned that they have to set aside every dream. They ever had every value they ever held holy And good every principle that they were taught by their own parents all of that had to be set aside so that something could be accomplished and nothing is accomplished when people compromise and when people set aside their their values see we're not called on to be effective. We are called on to be consistent and were called on to be faithful and that's all we've ever been called on to be and so it seems to me that within that context and within that understanding that we can only hope to bring closer the day when every human being can in fact live in harmony and in Justice and in peace not only with each other but with the world around them when one our actions flow out of our proximity to the poor and by that, I mean we shouldn't be in places where just about everybody is white and just about everybody is middle class and just about everybody smells and talks and acts this Name that is not what it means to be in proximity to people who are victimized. We also have to begin to act without regard for cost or Consequences. And as I said before with no concern for the effects because we only begin to have an effect and a good one. When we stop worrying about what the effect of our actions are going to be but only concern ourselves with the rightness and the necessity for those actions. We have to act with love and compassion and not just for the people that we would call friend. But for those who would at times be our adversaries and we have to act with the understanding that each of us could be May well be that which can cause the Breakthrough because the process of Change Is as predictable as it is mysterious. Now I have one final reading that I would like to share with you that I think shed some light on how change occurs it's from a little book called the hundredth monkey by Ken Kesey's. Is anybody ever read that book? Oh good a few of it's a very good book and the author published it and distributed it and didn't get paid for it and gives the books away the title of the book becomes clear with a reading but it's essentially an anti nuclear weaponry book. Let me show you let me show the Japanese monkey macaca few scada has been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years in 1952 on the island of Koh. Shima scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand the monkeys like the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant. An 18 month old female named emo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother and her Playmates to learned this new way and they taught their mothers also between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learn to wash the Sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable only the adults who imitated their children learn this social Improvement other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes, then something startling took place in the Autumn of 1958 a certain number of kosher monkeys were washing sweet potatoes. The exact number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning, there were 99 monkeys on cosima island who had learned to wash sweet potatoes and then it happened by that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them the edit energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough, but notice the most surprising thing observed by these scientists. Was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then spontaneously jumped over the sea colonies are monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys attack us akiyama began washing their sweet potatoes, too. Now I would also invite you to think for a moment. And in this part of the country, you should have no trouble doing so about a winter storm when the snow is coming down and I'm sure many of you have sat by a window and looked out and watched his millions and maybe even billions of snowflakes gathered on a tree limb until at some point one last little snowflake came down and the limb bent. the last snowflake had no more and no less to do with the bending of that tree limb, then the last or the first monkey had to do with that break through each of those snowflakes and each of those monkeys did only their share nothing more nothing less. That was all that was required of them. That it seems to me is all that is required of us, which means that in my opinion. It's possible to reduce everything. I've just said and everything that almost everyone has said for a very long time to essentially one question. And the question is what does it mean for me or for you for each of us to do our share in the creation of a saying and livable and just and Equitable world? now that is a question that I and other people that I live with and the community and other people that I know here in other places struggle with on a daily basis. And the first thing that you discover when you struggle with that question is that you can't answer it for anybody else and that if it were possible to answer it for anybody else you wouldn't because part of what it means part of the joy and part of the burden of what it means to be a human being is to come to grips with that question and to find your own answer and to work that answer out in where you live and the way you relate the way you think we Act (00:43:57) but (00:44:00) since I can't share that ultimate answer even if I had it, which I don't what I can share is a personal reflection that I have found quite helpful in giving me a better understanding of where the answer probably does lie. I live in that very big shelter Thousand Eleven Hundred beds are so in downtown Washington that we operate and it's a building predictably filled with people who are in very very bad shape. I have on many occasions stood on the front steps of that shelter in the evening and watched his literally hundreds of people poured into the building. Some of them are on crutches have a couple of folks who have no legs. They deposited them in Vietnam. We have people in wheelchairs. There's a couple of blind folks some of the some of the people are very very old summer style. Summer. Not many of them are mentally disabled Mumble and stare into space vacant leaves day as they walk by they are truly a broken and mutilated people. Very pathetic sight enough to quote wolf to render a person forever speechless with pity and I would stand there and say nothing. I would look out at all of these people coming in and while silent Outside Inside I was raging and inside I was screaming and what I was raging about in screaming at was God and I was saying look at all these people look at them. They haven't done anything wrong there any said why don't you do something? Why don't you do anything you have to do to make it better because this is crazy. These people haven't heard anybody. They need help. Why don't you do something? And then one night I realized. And what I realized was that it was and is in the existence of all of those people pouring into that shelter and in the existence of tens, if not hundreds of millions of people in that kind of shape of worse that God was in fact crying out to me. God was saying to me and to you what I had been saying to God and that is stop everything you're doing do anything you must to make it better anything nothing that you're doing now counts. All that counts is that these people are your brothers and sisters these people are in pain and nothing that you're doing is valid absolutely. Nothing makes any sense except stopping everything you're doing and making it better that in fact is what it means to be a human being and for anyone who is presumptuous enough to call himself a person of Faith there is virtually no choice and no option to be doing that. Nothing less makes any sense. Nothing less is proportionate. Nothing less is rational and nothing less is worthy of a human being. Now having said that I would invite people to either respond or to raise a question if you have one throw something if you like. There's a Hardy soul. Well a couple of reasons. First is in order to get a 501 c 3 which is tax exemption. We're we don't make a profit. Obviously we're at nonprofit but there's a difference between nonprofit and it's deciding being tax-exempt like the church is tax exempt and the Red Cross is tax-exempt. Lots of other groups are we're not you have to you have to be non-political you have to profess to be non-political there is absolutely nothing non-political about hunger and homelessness. Number two. There's a tendency on the part of anyone or anything that gives money for Grants privilege. And of course 501 c 3 is a privileges to demand subtly and not so subtly that thing be like you now we have absolutely no intention or desire to be anything like the government. Not at all. We already have enough bureaucracy and we already have enough paper and enough lunacy governing the land. We don't need us to contribute to it. Now. The three tax exemption is a privilege and in our community. There's a little little Banner on the wall that says privilege is a brutal way to live. And so we forgo it and number four. I know lots of people that make lots of money giving away money to charitable organizations and we have no intention of ever making it possible for people to give of their excess and their Surplus because it's only when people give of their substance that there's any hope of anything real occurring and so for all of those reasons and for the primary reason, which is that we are a community of faith and our trust is not in 501 C 3s. But in God that we forego the privilege of tax exemption and the burden of tax exemption because we don't intend to be puppets for anybody and we don't intend to let anyone but God pull the strings on. Not government officials and not corporate Executives not nobody we bow to the truth and we rise to it and to no other force or entity that we've encountered.