Reach Out and Touch Someone

This just struck me as one of those things that you can read, and it hits like a ton of rocks. The picture that immediately jumps into my mind is the hand of kindness to a homeless person. I have come quite close to being homeless in my time, and save for the grace of God go I. My family is always there, and that is what we all miss when we are suffering from our ego driven in overdrive mind. We forget that the world is designed to support us, even without family we have a support base called human kindness.

I have been driven to help homeless people many times, and I give what I can at the time. My friends sometimes think I'm crazy because there is this perception that the only reason someone would be homeless is because they are lazy or addicts. One truth is there is a growing number of old people who are losing their homes because they are fired from good paying jobs, to be replace with cheaper labor. Employment for older adults is difficult, and is never going to pay what a long time employee of a company would have made. They lose everything they were hoping to have for retirement in an effort to save their home.

There is also the population of seniors, without family, for whom the welfare system has become so difficult to navigate that they can't manage to get the system to work for them. There is also the old people that just are too proud to ask for a handout; this would be my mother. Without our willingness to help, they are going to be lost in the cracks.

But, you say, what about those people who dupe us? Well there is always a possibility of being duped. You say, "See I told you." I say, "Well better to be duped by a few, than to miss helping those in real need." The real thing here is, if you decide to help NONE because you are afraid that you MIGHT get duped, you miss helping the MANY who are in real need. The truth is that the bad karma for the duping of those who genuinely are giving out of loving kindness, goes to the person doing the duping while you will garner good karma for the attitude of giving in loving kindness even if you are duped. If, though, you decide to not help any because of a few bad apples, you get no good karma, and the bad karma accumulates strictly to you. I don't know, I think I prefer to accumulate good karma, and help when I can, even if it is only the loving touch of compassion that I can afford at the time.

Namaste
I AM that I AM