We as spiritual beings or souls come to earth in order to experience the human condition. This includes the good and the bad scenarios of this world. Our world is a duality planet and no amount of love or grace will eliminate evil or nastiness. We will return again and again until we have pierced the illusions of this density. The purpose of human life is to awaken to universal truth. This also means that we must awaken to the lies and deceit mankind is subjected to. To pierce the third density illusion is a must in order to remove ourselves from the wheel of human existences. Love is important but knowledge is the key! |
[Giuliani still has time between attending funerals of firemen who died because of his ineptitude and taking bows as a "hero" to do what he does best - have innocent people arrested. Good to know we are back to "normal" in NYC. http://baltech.org/lederman/ ] NY Times Subject: Trumping Charity December 20, 2001 Trumping Charity By BOB HERBERT The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church is on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, just north of Rockefeller Center. It's in the heart of a neighborhood that is saturated with money. The St. Regis Hotel is on the southeast corner. On the ground floor of the St. Regis is a Godiva chocolatier and a Louis Vuitton showroom. If you're contemplating a cruise, you should drop by Louis Vuitton. You can pick up anexquisite handmade Damier trunk for a shade over $10,000. Grab some chocolates at Godiva on the way back to your limousine. There are princesses and pink Christmas trees to delight the shoppers in the Disney Store on the northeast corner. And on the southwest corner is the Peninsula Hotel, where you can kick back and blow $400 or $500 on room service in a suite that, since Sept. 11, can be had for the bargain rate of $1,390 a night. It's a nice neighborhood. And everything would be swell if the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church could only manage to take its Christian charity mandates a little less seriously. You see, the church has been allowing homeless people to sleep on its property. They sleep on the steps and on the ground adjacent to the church — 20 or 30 of them spending the night in cardboard boxes and other makeshift shelters. The church makes bathrooms available to them and allows them to come in and warm up in the morning, before they take off for the day. This may sound like just the sort of thing President Bush had in mind when he suggested that faith-based organizations fill some of society's social service needs. But the thing you have to remember about the homeless, if you want to look at this from, say, the point of view of the Giuliani administration, is that they are unsightly. You can't have a couple of dozen people in threadbare clothes sleeping right out there where rich people can see them. Some of them were snoring away just a few yards from the double-parked limousines. So the city sicced the cops on them. At least three times this month the police have raided the area and forced the homeless, under threat of arrest, to go elsewhere. The most obnoxious raid came on the night of Dec. 11. Margaret Shafer, director of the church's outreach program, said five police cars and three vans arrived at the church about midnight and police officers chased away most of the sleepers, leaving only those who had taken refuge on the church steps and under an archway. "Then," said Ms. Shafer, "about every hour for the rest of the night they came up to the people they had left in place and they beat on the boxes with billy clubs and woke them up and asked them how their health was. It was not the police's finest hour." In fairness to the individual police officers, they did not seem happy with this duty. Ms. Shafer said the church generally has very good relations with the police. And a couple of the cops I spoke with at the church this week made it clear that harassing the homeless was not their idea of appropriate police work. "The orders came from on high," said one officer. When I asked another officer to explain the crackdown, he pointed toward the Fifth Avenue street sign. "They think it's bad for the area's image," he said. The homeless have been sleeping outside the church, with the blessings of its congregation, for about two years. The police were generally tolerant. But Ms. Shafer noted that church officials had been asked to clear the area a few nights in late November and early December because dignitaries were staying in nearby hotels. She said officers on the beat told her one of the dignitaries was Vice President Dick Cheney. Church officials complied, asking the homeless to stay away on those particular nights. When the homeless returned, the crackdown came. Yesterday a federal judge issued a temporary ruling barring the police from taking additional action against the homeless at the church. The matter will be argued further in court. But the ultimate issue remains. Where is the city's heart? Why, in hard times, is the Giuliani administration pursuing this particularly mean-spirited case? Well, it's a tough time for business, too. Ten-thousand-dollar Damier trunks are not exactly hopping off the shelves. And when the crunch comes, commerce almost always trumps charity, Christian or otherwise. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/opinion/20HERB.html LAME-DUCK MAYOR LETS HIS COLD HEART RULE AGAIN By DOUGLAS MONTERO ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- December 20, 2001 -- HAS the "dark side" of Mayor Giuliani, hidden since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, re-emerged just as he's leaving office? Leo Sacks, a parishioner at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, thinks so. While he continues to admire Giuliani's leadership of the city's fight against terror, he can't understand the city's new war on the homeless. The first shot was fired by the NYPD three weeks ago, when it first told the church to limit the hours homeless could sleep on the steps and along the outside wall of its pricey real estate at 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. It escalated into a demand to get rid of them altogether. Yesterday, the city lost a round when federal Judge Lawrence McKenna granted a temporary restraining order, sought by the church, barring cops from rousting the sleepers. "There is no reason to consider homeless people sleeping a public nuisance," the judge said. Sacks agrees wholeheartedly. "For all of his grace under fire since September, this is the darker side of the Giuliani legacy," he said. "There is something very noble and Christian about caring for another human being and that's what people in this community are trying to do." In court, the city accused the church of operating the "world's worst homeless center." "I'm not suggesting their heart is in the wrong place . . . but there are rules and there are laws," said city lawyer Daniel Connolly, insisting public-nuisance laws are being violated. But McKenna said the round-ups would "impinge" on the church's First Amendment rights and cause irreparable harm to its ministry. Besides, said the judge, the city has allowed the homeless to sleep on the steps for two years. The trouble began when cops, "under pressure from City Hall," asked the church to relocate the homeless for one night because Vice President Dick Cheney was staying at the nearby St. Regis Hotel, said Margaret Shafer, who runs the shelter. The cops called back the next day, mentioned that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was in town, and said the church should toss the homeless for three more nights, said Joe Vadella, another shelter worker. Then the cops wanted the church to keep the homeless from setting up their cardboard tents until 9 p.m., three hours later than they usually do. The church, which has a permit to accommodate only 10 homeless people indoors, complied with all the requests, but filed its lawsuit Monday after cops began strong-arming the homeless off church property. The homeless mess would be a non-issue if the church were located on another Fifth Avenue - like the one in Brooklyn's Sunset Park. But seeing the other side of life can provide a good lesson for the rich, particularly at Christmas. As Shafer put it: "We insist on providing this service because we have a right and obligation to help the city remember that we have homeless people."