Day 109j: The Spirit in every Slum … (August 16, 2019)
I ambled onward thereafter, wondering over Newark’s disconcerting lack of public benches as I did so. And yet the lack of places for residents to simply sit & be was actually the least dismissive thing about those first few miles of this city. For here I encountered a level of abject poverty & palpable despair that I had never seen or felt during any of my previous travels … How can any society justify allowing any semblance of the same to remain – especially in the what is without debate the wealthiest nation on Earth? The injustice and raw callousness of it all was almost too much to take, and my heart wept with these Good People at the way they were being betrayed …
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have just as much soul as you, and am full of just as much heart! … Indeed, there are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread, and people so lonely that the Divine can only be witnessed in a stranger’s smile. Let us all offer them that bread. Let us all lend them that smile.” ~ inspired by Charlotte Brontë, Mahatma Gandhi & the people of South Newark
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