Skip to main content

Thoughts on Vagrancy

In the movie First Blood, Sylvester Stallone comes to a small town looking for a military buddy.  Stallone is a highly decorated veteran, but since he has long hair and dressed shabbily, the sheriff picks him up, drops him at the county line and tells him never to come back.  The rest is Stallone’s revenge.  Stallone was a vagrant in that movie.  He was considered homeless, a bum, a hobo.

In the San Francisco Bay Area we have many, many, hundreds, maybe thousands of such vagrants.  They exist because the policies and the programs of various cities.  In places like San Francisco, it is a crime to accost or speak roughly to a beggar.  People live on the street, dump their trash on the street, accost and threaten people and the police are powerless to do anything.

There is a space between our church and the fence of the next property.  We store some equipment there.  Recently a many decided to make that his home.  He built tents between the fence and our building, setup a latrine area and lived there.  I told him he had to leave and he started yelling at me and coming at me.  I called the police and I was told, “What would you like us to do?”  I asked them to arrest that man for trespassing, and they said that was not possible.  That man has yelled at and approached older ladies in our congregation and the police will not do anything.  Two days ago, I went back there and found that he was not there.  I threw away all of his stuff and he has not been back since.


Progressive, leftist, socialist, communist policies put the blame of homelessness and beggars on the tax paying populous.  They claim that we have created a society in which these people exist.  An unfair, unequal society.  If the rich would only pay their fair share, they say, there would be no beggars.  That, of course is a lie.  Beggars that accost, threaten and annoy people are a blight on a civilized society.  But our jails are filled to the max and we are not building any more, so there is no place to put them.  Homeless shelters have a 6 months waiting list.  In San Lorenzo, there are many group homes of developmentally disabled people.  They are housed and fed with tax money, but during the day, they just wander the streets and beg, because there is nothing else to do.  They are bored.

It would be fantastic if society would truly take care of those who cannot take care of themselves, but the line between a truly hungry beggars and a bored group home member and a gypsy scam artists is blurred, so we just accept it and ignore it.

I have attached the audio of today’s radio broadcast of the Armstrong and Getty show out of Sacramento.  Jack Armstrong lives in David California and he, his wife and his 5 and 7 year old sons had a run in with a beggar.  This is what civilized America has come to.


Jack Armstrong and the Homeless Beggar


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cornerstone Fellowship

Cornerstone Fellowship started preaching truth in 1946, right after WW II.  It has been a light in a changing community and a changing world for the past 70 years.  Currently I am the pastor of Cornerstone.  My name is Michael L. Wilson.  It is my goal to preach truth and to explain truth to all who attend.   We subscribe to the reformed view of Christianity which includes the  Five Solas , or the five foundational "only" beliefs.   If you are looking for a Christ Centered church, let me recommend  Cornerstone Fellowship

Thoughts on “agnostic”

Prior to being a pastor I was a believer in Jesus Christ.  I was raised in church and sought out a church every Sunday no matter where I was.  In other words, I consider myself a true believer in Jesus Christ and the Christian religion.  I am an exception in today’s society.  People who are willing to stand up and state that they are basing their lives on the teaching of Jesus Christ is rare. Many years ago, when I was a computer programmer, I worked with all sorts of people.  Buddhists and Hindus and even some Christians.  Most of the tech crowd were what I would call “casual atheists.”  This means that they never gave church or the Bible a second thought.  They go through life and never think about God.  If asked, many would say they believe in God, probably because they were taken to church as a child.  But any definition of this God could not be given by most of these people. One person I meant actually called himself an agnostic .  Agnostic is a Greek word which literally mean

Cornerstone Fellowship 5/6/18 **Psalm 17** Rev. Michael L. Wilson