Difficult Thoughts

I have a gay friend in his late thirties whose southern Baptist family continues to deride and scorn him for his sexual orientation, trusting in their religious faith as ironclad inspiration for their contempt and derision.  I shudder reading the accounts of militants in the Middle East who want to bomb the region into submission to the laws of Shariah.  I am revolted reading in the so-called black books of Martin Heidigger of his virulent hatred of Jews--this in the thirties and forties!--whilst professing a system of philosophy that seems far distant from it.  I cannot tolerate the idea that people will allow themselves to become captive to a system of belief that forces them to act destructively to their fellow human beings.  And yet, I have to examine my own conscience.  I do not find it in my heart to love or even recognize or accept as fellow humans so many of the drugged or alcoholic homeless persons I see lurking about in our cities today.  I live in a city with a warm climate that is a natural shelter for persons who are driven to live out of doors.  They are visible, sometimes in large groups, and I am angered at seeing them, because I fear for the comfort of law and order to which I cling perhaps too desperately.  Control, organization, rules, regulations, it is all too obvious that I truly fear anomie.  But in the end that is neither here nor there.  I cannot find it in my heart to love, --forget that, understand, --or that,--tolerate,--there, that is a better word, and yet I have had to fight all my life for acceptance as a gay male.  I find the homeless unclean and hopeless and failing in the important rules of life.  That is what so many many people in this world would say about me.  Hitler wanted to segregate and destroy gay people and he had a lot of his countrymen willing to go along with him on that project.  I want to move the homeless out of the downtown of my pretty city.  Where to?  Is a kind of Dachau lurking in the misty trembling regions of my mind?  Not really able to say it, think it, but know that there must be some "place" for these people.  The remnants of Christianity that I learned in my youth remind me that the Christ loved the poor and the desperate, mingled with the equivalent homeless of his day, but all I have is fear.  Once upon a time when I was much younger I  volunteered to teach in prisons, volunteered in soup kitchens to make food for persons with AIDS who were not ambulatory, maybe it is time to get up off this aged butt and find a soup kitchen down here where there might be something I could do if only to improve my mental and moral health.