After a night on the town with co-workers, I found myself wending my way down 14th Street headed for McPherson Square. Walking by a formerly Lutheran now non-denominational church, I saw a man ahead of me leaning against the low brick wall alongside the church. Another person walking in the other direction slowed down as he walked past the man, then hurried past. I assumed that the leaner had asked for money, and prepared my response ("I don't have any cash on me"). He didn't ask me for money.

He was gnarled. He smelled bad, and clearly his bone structure was not at all what it should be. On his head was a hat, with what looked like a Marine Corps logo of some kind. His face was healthy looking, remarkably so considering the malformation of the rest of him. It was too dark for me to see his teeth well.

"Can you help me walk home?"

I was taken aback to hear such a request. I paused. I had enough time before the metro stopped, and even if I didn't... well he was bringing himself to a standing position, his hand outstretched, and I didn't have it in me to tell him no at that point. I could afford a cab ride home if it took too long.

The joints of his hands were swollen. I was glad that it was cold and windy out, since it made it hard to smell him. His right leg was not at a normal angle to his body. I don't remember the litany of bodily ills he chanted to me as we made our jerky way. He told me that he had fallen twice already. We had to stop several times so he could rest.

His name was Mark. After walking him to an apartment building to find the automatic glass doors locked, I wondered if this was a particularly elaborate hoax. We stood outside, him in front of the door marked exit, me hanging back and wondering what to do. I tried to move him toward the door marked as the entrance, but he seemed to be determined to stand on the wrong side. I could see a booth off to one side, and the shoulder of a security guard.

After a wait of about twenty seconds, Mark pressed against the door and looking in, me standing uncertainly, the security guard shifted her bulk and began to walk toward the door. I was pretty sure at this point that my night was about to get interesting. The guard was going to tell him to go away and stop trying to get in. I was going to take him on a grand tour, or make some excuse and go home.

She opened the door, declared, "You had better find your pass. I'm not going to keep letting you in." Then she turned around and began to walk back to her station. Mark, unphased, hobbled inside. I called out a "Have a good night Mark." to him as he went in, feeling rather offended that a building security officer would have it in her to be so rude to a resident of the building who was so obviously not entirely capable of living on his own but was anyway.

I don't consider myself to be a particularly good person. There are plenty of ways that I don't live up to the standards I would consider as the threshold for decent behavior. But I do things like assisting random nearly disabled men to walk home instead of leaving them on the street in the middle of the night. At this point my thoughts came fast and jumbled. I was relieved that I had helped that poor man at so little cost to myself. I was angry that he was living in such a state. I was angry with the security guard. I wondered if I had any right to be angry with someone for not being nice enough to another person without knowing more about the circumstances.

As I turned the thoughts over in my mind, I turned to a more general line of thinking. I was reminded of a passage from the bible:

‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”

Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’

This, among many other passages, are what constitutes what I would consider the "true" teachings of Christ, and one of the ones that is very often ignored by those people who claim to be Christians. This stunning hypocrisy was one of the most significant wedges that drove me away from acceptance of religion when I was young.

As I mulled that over, I walked by the offices of the Republican National Committee. Not two blocks away from it are broken remnants of human beings. They have the unconscionable gall to go about the business of trying to secure political clout for th

This is the party that has claimed Christianity for itself. The party that says they believe in freedom from government interference. The party that worships at the altar of Reaganomics. The party that hates the poor.

Reagan appointed Milton Friedman, the father of the idea "natural rate of unemployment," to his board of economic advisers, and when Paul Volcker stepped down, Reagan appointed a disciple of Ayn Rand to be Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan. To Greenspan, keeping unemployment high isn't a temporary exigency to reverse stagflation. According to Reaganomics, high unemployment is absolutely essential to capitalism. For the masses, Reagan himself talked about "Morning in America," but if you read the business pages and the economics press, the Reagan team was perfectly blunt. Yes, hundreds of thousands of middle class people were intentionally reduced to grinding poverty or worse. It was also tacitly understood that this policy was going to be devastating to African Americans in the working class; as the old saying goes, when the white economy gets a fever, the black economy dies of pneumonia. Last hired, first fired; that kind of thing. The Reagan team and their admirers have never openly confronted the implications in terms of public health, family stability, the effect their policies would have on children, or the thousands who've died over the years because of Reaganomics -- frozen to death under overpasses, murdered in over-crowded homeless shelters, or just the traditional way out for the obsoleted male, suicide. But even if they had, they would have justified the thousands of human sacrifices they've shoveled into the jaws of Moloch because those sacrifices prevented a bigger problem. If we hadn't killed those thousands of people, if we hadn't ruined the lives of millions of people over the years since then, then the US economy would never have recovered from stagflation. The resulting economic collapse would have ruined and killed many more. A few were sacrificed to save the many.

How were the American people persuaded to accept this? They were taught to hate the poor. They were taught that having a job is a precious privilege, and one that only the most special people deserve. The American people were carefully taught that the 6% of the adult population that have done nothing wrong but still can't find even part time or temporary work are unemployed because they just aren't good enough. It was their own fault. If only they'd been a little better at clawing their way to the top, it would have been somebody else, somebody less worthy than they, who'd be living in a refrigerator carton under a bridge on the waterfront. To a certain type of person, this was a very comforting message, because it absolved them from any feelings of guilt, and from any sense of obligation towards the needs of the down-trodden.

- From Infamous Brad

Dear Republicans, Libertarians, and anyone else who doesn't think they should have to pay taxes for social safety net programs: As you have done to the least of these, so have you done to me. When you declared war on the poor, you declared war on me, and you declared war on humanity itself. You are monsters. You sicken me.