Our marvelous free press must have downplayed this bit of news. I only just discovered an article reporting that Tennessee in 2020 officially made it a Felony for homeless people to camp on “Public Land.”

That’s right, in Tennessee, which surely has to be one of the most touted allegedly Christian states of America, if a poor homeless person is found to have tossed a sleeping bag on any public land, he is liable for a fine and 6 years’ imprisonment.

Is that how Jesus Christ proposed his followers treat poor people? I must have missed that chapter’s training in my Sunday bible school as a young boy seeking guidance for how one is supposed to lead one’s life.

Can you imagine a more putrid example of how politically corrupted allegedly Christian Americans have become? How utterly disgusting that this can happen in America. It is even more disgusting that this never became a serious news item.

The very foundation of our country’s allegedly spiritual culture in our faces and we hear essentially nothing about it in our much-vaunted media. It simply slips under the radar and happens without our raising the slightest concern.

In my personal non-belief in gods or god, I do not attack Christianity. Who can object to “Do unto others as you would be done unto?}. I do, however, attack such Christians

as these who get away with passing such legislation. Did these Tennessee politicians forget that they actually carry their much loved dollar bills stating, “In God We Trust?”

It’s the deep profundity of their hypocrisy that amazes me. They appear proud that they can do something like this. It is more amazing that their Christian churches so easily allowed it to happen and did not march in force to local TV stations.

Americans supposedly are distressed now that our Democracy is at risk. Our failure as a nation is far beyond that. Our failure intellectually is far beyond that. And as to our “spirituality,” I decline to comment on that precariously controversial issue.

This country has lost its grip. We as a people have lost our grip. America’s middle class with their mortgaged homes and loan-encrusted luxury cars have so distanced themselves from any rational reality, it paralyzes the mind.

The 80% of us who have somehow finessed our capitalist system of life and politics and gotten our little piece of the financial action, allowing us to utterly ignore the cost it forces on the 20% with essentially nothing – what can one say?

We may be capable only of waiting mutely until this corrupted America takes us down too.  We seem mentally incapable of acknowledging the depth of our own intellectual corruption. It’s all always the other guy’s fault.

The guilt weighs heavy on my shoulders.

Does it weigh heavy on yours?

Hal