... but for the grace of god there go I

Something to think about....

What if you were a single parent with a child . You work full time for $15.00 hr. usually a 40 hour week which comes to $600.  After taxes and other deductions like insurance you bring home roughly $450.00 per week, $900 (bi-weekly) or $1800 month salary.

Your bills total

 $1,000 rent 

 $160 utilities

 $200 car payment

 $50 car insurance

  $240 groceries ($60 week)

   $50 cell phone

   $80 gas ($20 week)

_______

$1780

It's taking nearly everything you earn to just barely get by. We haven't even talked about daycare yet. You could possibly have a young child that someone needs to watch while you work. Some daycares can cost as much as $200 a week. The kids father is missing or refuses to pay child support.

  The point is, there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck and it's taking their entire paycheck to pay for just the bare necessities.

Now what if something were to happen, like say by chance you don't get 40 hours one week. You find yourself having to make a choice between cell phone, gas or groceries. You can't take anything from rent or utilities. Some of you complain about so many people on the roads driving without proper tags, registration and insurance, even licenses, now you see and know why. 

  Let's say something happens to your car and it needs a major repair, a really hot summer or colder than usual winter where you get a $400 Power bill, you miss a week of work or even just a few days because your child is sick and can't attend daycare with a fever. 

   You're now faced with a decision of how to you pay your bills, is there one that can wait until next month? Even if there is, come next month, you're still faced with the same decision and will be every month until you somehow get caught back up. 

   Maybe let's say you don't pay the entire power bill hoping they will add the balance to next month's bill, but they don't. Your power gets shut off. Now what? You call the power company and since it was disconnected, they now tell you that you have to pay a $250 deposit to get it back on. You can't pay it so you do the best you can until you can get it back on but your landlord finds out.

The lease on your apartment says you get evicted if your utilities are off so you get served with a notice saying you have 10 days to get out. 

You find another place but they want first months rent and equal deposit. If you had that much you would have never been evicted, plus they run a background & credit check and now see you were evicted which disqualifies you from renting anywhere.

No family, no close friends to stay with, you’re now living in your car if you're lucky to still have it. You have a child or children with you. You couldn't afford a storage so you had to leave a lot of things behind. The landlord keeps your security deposit for breaking the lease and cleaning fees for the things you left. You only have room in your car for just what you need to get by. 

Youve lost everything, you're paying to take showers at a truck stop, you're living on gas station food. Some do gooder comes along and sees you & your kids living like this & calls Social Services thinking you're some deadbeat parent. Police come and guess what? They take your child. 

You are trying to explain, no one is listening, things escalate, your child is crying, you're getting angry, next thing you know you're being put in handcuffs for disorderly conduct, assault on an officer, resisting arrest, loitering, child endangerment, taken to jail, can't pay a bond, you serve time, you now have a record. In order to get your child back you have to prove financial responsibility, have a place to live, food in the fridge, all those things you had before you were evicted but you can't because you can't get a job. You're now a convicted felon for assaulting an officer and have a record. Everywhere you turn is a dead end. Your car was impounded and racked up impound lot fees you can't pay. They won't let you get your belongings out of it. You're on the street with nothing but the clothes on your back. Homeless shelter is full no where to go. Don't be seen or caught in the open or you're arrested as a vagrant. When people start pointing or staring, you either duck behind cars out of sight or try to make it appear as if you're digging for your keys in your backpack. Anything so that no one calls the police again.

I’ll stop here ..... I hope you get the point . 

These are people you see everyday. They were once our co-workers, they were neighbors, they could even be our family or friends, but now they are standing on the street at major intersections with a sign asking for help. Imagine how humbling or humiliating that can be.

  THESE   PEOPLE ARE YOU AND ME!!

We are all so close to homelessness & don’t even realize it . Yes, this scenario is full of extreme circumstances but there are cases where the extreme happens. People getting hit with one bad break after another.

All it takes is : 

* one unexpected bill

* one major car repair

* one lay-off 

* one  house fire 

 *one sick child

 *one freak accident

and we find ourselves having to make that decision, what does or doesn't get paid.

I go on social media sites or community apps and I see people posting about situations where they may see people on the streets asking for help. Maybe someone in a parking lot acting strange. You may know of a section of woods where you suspect homeless people may be living.

Instead of judging people who are less fortunate than you because you think you got to where you are from having worked harder, or condemning someone who's homeless thinking the reason they are is because they spend all their money on drugs or lock your doors out of fear when you approach an intersection where someone is holding a sign asking for help, instead of calling the police because you suspect there's a crowd of deplorables living in a section of woods you pass by, worried they are breaking into homes, instead of demanding these people be arrested because you just know they are part of an operation involved in human trafficking, instead of making their life even more difficult because they make you uncomfortable, why don’t you try practicing some gratitude that you’re not in their shoes and offer some help. If you don't feel comfortable offering help or personally you can't afford to, then maybe mind your own business. If you are threatened by the people and I'm not talking about hypothetically or what if but actually verbally threatened or feel someone poses an actual harm to someone then call police but this whole attitude acting like every person who doesn't look like you, talk like you, dress like you, live like you or you think doesn't belong in your neighborhood, needs to stop. Stop the self righteous, inflated ego and just plain ignorant attacks on innocent people thinking you're some how better than they are. Try practicing some humility.

I realize there are evil people in the world. Not everyone is your friend. Some people want your money, some want your car or belongings and some may want you, but there are those who legitimately want and desperately need your help.

 Yes, someone's it's hard or near impossible to distinguish between those that are out to take advantage of you and those needing assistance. The only possible solution may be to outlaw all types of solicitation. Eliminate the act of asking for or receiving help in any way other than going through agencies specifically for this. Charlotte has even had one of it's leaders suggest giving fines to people who "feed the animals", specifically making it illegal to help someone without going through a licensed charity or government agency.

This country has a habit of this type of thinking and action. Rather than solve the problem, we allow the problem to continue and try to eliminate negative outcomes of the problem. It's like trying to plug a hole in a dam with sand. If by miracle it did work, the water would just find the next weakest point. 

It's a selfish decision. Rather than put in the effort to fix it right, we choose the easiest, quicker way or complain loud until somebody does something.

In the scenario, things should never be allowed to get to that point. People shouldn't be working for $15 an hour while some earn billions. I'm not against capitalism or earning what you work for but honestly, Amazon could DOUBLE every single one of their employees pay rate and Jeff Bezos could still live a lavish lifestyle. No one person should have multiple mansions spread across the world while there are those who are homeless. The majority of humanity should not be ruled by a select few and struggle in the process. No one in the entire world, ANYWHERE, should have a want or a need for anything. If this is what society has evolved too where it has become normal to step on others to get to where we are going then it is wrong and we will not last. It is a slow global suicide. We will eventually kill ourselves and quite possibly have already done that once or several times before. We will continue to do it until we learn to take care of this place we live, take care of each other and live by that one golden rule. 

Self destruction isn't far away. Everyday we divide ourselves further by any and all lines imaginable... Race, religion, sexual identify, politically, financially, age, creed, geographically and on. We constantly look for new ways to draw lines to separate ourselves from the group or actually to separate and remove those we don't want in the group.

This is about staying humble & being kind. Humility defined to me is knowing I'm no better than while knowing I'm also no less than. The best way to show humility is do something kind for someone but do it in a  way that they don't know who did it and don't tell anyone what you did. Help someone 100 percent anonymously.

Tell yourself, but for the grace of god there go I. We are in this together and it will take us working together to get out of it.

 

LWH2021

Love can't be defined

Love can't be defined. It's different for everyone. For some it's unconditional, others may put conditions on whether or not it's given or taken. Honestly though, whether we want to give it or not, whether we want to receive it or not, love is everywhere in everything. It's a universal seed responsible for all life, a master emotion that supercedes all others, the solution to every problem, the answer to every question. It's up to individual responsibility if we want to see it, feel it, use it or not. For that very reason we can't logically pin it to only one certain thing. Hell sometimes it's hard enough to even explain it or understand it, much less define it.

Love is more than being happy, laughing, enjoying someone's presence in your life or everything being perfect. Sometimes love is despising the person you're with but willing to lower your expectations for a minute, raise your level of acceptance and support them through the process of changing the behaviors that made you despise them to begin with. 

Sometimes love is being willing to look at your own shortcomings and willing to make changes in yourself. Love isn't always about just giving and receiving, sometimes it's about sacrificing and humbly learning to accept help. 

Love is not only the catalyst responsible for creating new relationships, it can also be the strength to end a relationship. Even if you do separate yourself from a personal relationship, that doesn't necessarily mean you stopped or even have to stop loving them. Love means you can still be there for that person if they need help, a shoulder to cry on or just someone to vent to. Love can also be loving yourself enough to leave that relationship all together if it's the cause of chaos in your life. In fact, when we come to those crossroads and find ourselves facing that decision of whether or not to walk away, heartbroken and full of self doubt, if we take a moment to dig around in the muck of what's left and find that little ember of love that's still there and it always is, love can never be entirely put out, but if we find it, focus on it, put it in our hearts to replace that which has been missing, use it for strength to keep moving forward, life from that point will be less painful, shorten the grieving process, put us and keep us on a shorter, easier path to finding our love, that love meant for us we can't live without.

We rarely consider that loving principles such as humility, compassion and forgiveness are just as much for our enemies, if not more for them, as they are for those we like and accept. We don't have to be infatuated with a person, related to or involved with anyone in any way in order to be kind or to help them. We should be kind and willing to help anyone, in everything we do. That's love.

If we don't soon get a grasp on some of these concepts and principles that give us opportunities to express our love - things like the golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), love thy neighbor, volunteering our time, be of service to others, believe all life matters,  remain humble and especially learn to love unconditionally, in other words, something completely opposite of the shit that society is doing now, our future as an evolving species isn't looking too good. What we've been doing, the way we treat others and for that matter, how we treat ourselves, is not working. It never will. 

We have been conditioned to put conditions on just about everything we do, especially in the way we interact with and treat others. Conditions on how we see ourselves. We lack an identity and are lost because we are subjected to subliminal ads that tell us we aren't tall enough, fast enough, pretty enough, smart enough or anything enough without something we can purchase for the special discounted price of $??.⁹⁵ and if we call now we can get two, yes a second one for just the cost of shipping. That will surely fix us and all our problems we're told.

 We have divided ourselves along every line imaginable. Separating ourselves into groups consisting of those who share our passion on a particular topic. This will always automatically create an opposing group because everyone is not going to share our vision or stance on a topic. Sometimes I seriously believe the only reason some of these groups are even started or remain in existence is 

a) so these groups will expose those that don't share your beliefs

b) so that those who don't share your beliefs can now be harassed.

C) because it would create an entity that can be very profitable for some people.

America right now is severely divided racially, politically, sexually, religiously, we're even making shit up to divide us even further. We are right on that edge of global suicide. We're killing ourselves while AI (artificial intelligence) is evolving past us with lightning speed, WITH OR WITHOUT US. 

Our focus right now should be on learning how to get past our differences instead of fighting or running from one another.

LWH2021©

Self Sabotaging Blame Game

People need to stop giving others advice and telling them  it's time to leave a relationship or worse, some action to take against the person they are involved with. 

The only thing we know about a person or the one they are in a relationship with is that one of them may be asking us for advice, like how will they know when is it time to leave that relationship. Just because they are asking that question or looking for answers doesn't automatically mean the relationship is over. In order for us to accurately answer that question for someone, we would need to go live in the relationship for long enough time to know when, why or even if anyone should leave. I say anyone because we could possibly end up seeing that the person coming to us looking for answers is actually the one causing problems. We may want to tell the other person to get away from this person who's blaming them, but we don't do that and never should. If I can give a person advice or tell them what decision to make, then go home, sit in my recliner and have to never suffer any consequences from that, then I should never be the one making the decision. It's like telling someone to jump off a 100 ft. cliff into the water and not knowing if the water is actually deep enough. If you aren't going to jump first then you have no right telling someone else its safe.

Just because a person asked a question about when do you know when a relationship is over, does not mean it's over now and time to go.  Stop telling this people what to do in their relationships. 

Being unhappy, feeling unloved, unwanted, jealous, suspicious, used, neglected, unappreciated or all of the above are not immediate reasons to leave a relationship unless you, yourself, are 100% sure that you are emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, financially and egotistically healthy and of sound mind which I doubt any one of us are. At any given time we will be struggling in at least one or more of those areas. We aren't perfect beings. Any one of those things or any combination of those being screwed up with us could project onto the other person. For example if we bring trust issues from a past relationship into a new one, we could cause that person to withdraw or start acting differently which in turn makes us suspicious so we now have this domino effect going on untill we're at each other's throats and packing. We would most likely be blaming the other person, oblivious to anything we are doing wrong, but all along the problems in the relationship are because we never dealt with the baggage from the last relationship.

A person, even ourselves could be suffering from any number of things, depression, PTSD, mid life crisis, post partum, anxiety, physical pain, grief, paranoia or stress. Ending a relationship that one or more of these negative defects has reared its ugly head in may or may not resolve those problems and could actually make things worse. 

I can say this, if the ones involved in the relationship aren't BOTH willing to talk, do some type of personal inventory, together do an inventory on the relationship and get to the bottom of what's going on, so at least you'll know what needs to change and the parties involved are BOTH willing to put effort into seeing that change come about, then it most likely would never work anyway.

Love is more than being happy, laughing, enjoying someone's presence in your life or everything being perfect. Sometimes love is despising the person your with but willing to lower your expectations for a minute, raise your level of acceptance and support them through the process of changing the behaviors that made you despise them to begin with. Sometimes love is being willing to look at your own shortcomings and willing to make changes yourself. Love isn't always about giving and receiving, sometimes it's about sacrificing and learning to accept help. Even if you end of separating yourself from this person, you can still be there for them. Humility, compassion and forgiveness are just as much for our enemies as they are for those we accept. We don't have to be infatuated with a person in order to be kind or to help them.

If we don't soon get ahold of this human condition, golden rule, love thy neighbor, brothers keeper, all lives matter, unconditional love shit, our future as an evolving species isn't looking too good. We are divided along every line imaginable right now, racially, politically, sexually, religiously, we're even making shit up to divide is even further. We are right on that edge of global suicide. We're killing ourselves while AI (artificial intelligence) is evolving past us with lightning speed, WITH OR WITHOUT US. Our focus right now should be on learning how to get past our differences instead of fighting or running from one another.

LWH2021