Matthew 5:5: Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

[JimHow]

So I live in Lewiston, Maine, a great old town in New England. My second favorite city is Boston, my favorite city is Lewiston. It's one of those "old mill towns" of New England, it gets beat up on, like other cities, like New Bedford, and Manchester, and Lawrence/Lowell, and Biddeford, and Bristol, and Providence, and Nashua, and dozens of other places up this way, where the mills have closed up, the drugs have come in, the downtowns have closed down. What was a mild winter 2022/23 has turned into a nasty, harsh February. Today, on Lisbon Street, out front of my law office, I watched one of the young homeless men hanging out at the corner of Lisbon/Ash streets, he's been around for about three days, I'm pretty familiar with most of the homeless folk on the street but I haven't recognized this young man, he's been hanging out pretty quietly soliciting money at the street corner, with his cardboard message, soliciting cars coming up to the red light. It was really cold this morning. Like really cold, sunny, but minus-zero, with a wind. This fellow had been out all night. Even though he had been out front of my office for three days, I hadn't interacted with him yet. He was just there, in quiet desperation. It must have been about 8am, after a long night on the street, a car came up to the corner. The driver reached out and gave the young man a bill. I watched the whole thing. The fellow took the bill, and the car drove off. After the car was gone, the fellow looked at the bill. I couldn't see what it was, a five, ten, or twenty, I was standing about 15 feet away. He looked at the bill, and then he closed his eyes. And then he said to himself, with his eyes closed, quietly, but loud enough for me to hear him: "Oh thank you, god. Thank you, god."

It brought a tear to my eye. I find great joy in helping those in need, it is something to which I have devoted most of my adult life. I'm an atheist, but I've tried to live the life of Jesus, to comfort the poor, to help those less fortunate, to not judge others, lest he who is without sin cast the first stone. I'm not wealthy, but I felt beyond rich in the moment that I gave the fellow the lone $20 bill in my pocket, expanding on his good fortune on this sunny but bitterly cold New England morning. Let's all just help each other a little bit, I say, and everything will be alright as we struggle through. Let's all of us BWEers help somebody out this week as bitter winter closes out, give somebody a $20 bill, or a coffee, or anything, to just try to make things even just a little bit better.... We're all in this together. It's what Jesus would do if he were a BWEer.

[RPCV]

Generosity, kindness, service....so touching. Thanks for sharing Jim.

[jal]

This is heart wrenching. Homelessness, inequality, divisions. These were always around but seem to be much worse nowadays.

[AKR]

Thank you for reminding us of our blessings.

[stefan]

The question for us is not whether to help the disadvantaged, but how to help. Our choice is to donate to Food Bank and a local organization that helps the poor, realizing that a certain percentage goes to running the organizations. We consider that better than taking the risk that our money ends up in the hands of drug dealers. Moreover, our donations are larger this way because they are made with pre tax dollars.

[Nicklasss]

Me too, i give to two organizations, one that helps the poors, and the other help some who live big event (burned house, weather or earthquake homeless), directly removed from my paycheck.

But yes, it is good to think we help a little bit some other persons.

[JimHow]

I've seen a lot of pain in my 37 years of practice in criminal law and at ground zero on Lisbon Street in one of the poorest census tracts in the country. I've never seen anything like the hardship I'm seeing these days. Something very basic is breaking in the fabric of our society. I fear where this is leading.

[JCNorthway]

I've never seen anything like the hardship I'm seeing these days.

Jim, I agree. The difference between those who have and those who have not has greatly expanded, leaving those who have not in a much worse situation. From a socio-economic "theory" perspective, there are many explanations for this. But none of them provide the basic food and shelter that I think we all grew up assuming would be there for all of us.

[PghMike]

Great original post. I was raised Catholic but lost the faith and kept many of the values. I found the hypocrisy difficult to stomach. It seems we as a society are biased towards a speedy negative judgement in nearly all facets of life versus seeking to understand and engage.

[JimHow]

Indeed, Mike. When I was the young mayor of Lewiston back in 1990-94 we were seeing a terrible scourge of cocaine and heroin addiction coming out of the 1980s, as the textile mills were closing and drugs were coming in from out of state. Our local hospitals began to notice low birth weights and developmental delays in their maternity units, because babies were being born addicted to the drugs in their system. They were behind the eight ball even before out of the womb. I created a task force to study the problem comprised of judges and doctors and social workers and educators etc., and they issued a report predicting a generational disaster and the need for aggressive treatment and intervention. Instead the politicians like Clinton and Gingrich and everyone on both sides of the aisle thought it best in their wisdom to conduct a "war on drugs," with heavy incarceration that impacted discriminately the poor, minorities, drug addicts. Well how'd that work for them. Now, thirty years later, these babies born in drugs and poverty are in another generation of poverty, with high crime rates, more drug addiction with much more potent drugs like fentanyl, and the vicious cycle continues.... And the politicians keep posturing....

[AlexR]

I think the problem is both societal and poltical.

One of the yardsticks by which developed countries are measured is the way they treat their poor.

The Protestant Ethic is alive and well in America and this weighs heavily on the political reality.
It means that the "haves" figure they deserve what they possess, and that if the "have nots" don't possess much, it's their own damned fault, and let them get themselves out of their mess.
It's not my problem, I don't want to know...

The logical extension of this line of thought is that what's mine is mine and i'll vote for anyone who lets me keep as much of it as possible.
Taxes are anathema, the poor are lazy and reproduce too much, civil servants are good-for-nothings, etc.

Politicians spout "People are our most precious resource".
But then look what they do or, rather, don't do.

As regards black people, there is no way on earth we live in a post-racial society! The blacks were brought to the US as slaves, and the sins of our fathers have been visited upon us. Maybe it's about time we faced up to this and really tried to help.

Alex R.