unfortunately,
many Americans live
on outskirts of hope

Based on the President Lyndon B. Johnson – Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union – January 08, 1964 [ As delivered in person before a joint session ].

President Johnson said:

This budget, and this year’s legislative program, are designed to help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes–his hopes for a fair chance to make good; his hopes for fair play from the law; his hopes for a full-time job on full-time pay; his hopes for a decent home for his family in a decent community; his hopes for a good school for his children with good teachers; and his hopes for security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age.

Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope–some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.

It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.

Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts.

For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.

The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.

Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists–in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.

Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.

The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities …

… in a lack of education and training,

… in a lack of medical care and housing,

… in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

That a President admitted this.

That a country, for the most part, accepted this.

How much has this country changed.

How much hate has the country stored up.

How did we get from there … to here, in 60 years.

children singing and
strong men groping for handholds
singing God loves us

Hope is a tattered flag and a dream out of time
Hope is a heartspun word, the rainbow, the shadblow in white,
The evening star inviolable over the coal mines,
The shimmer of northern lights across a bitter winter night,
The blue hills beyond the smoke of the steel works.
The birds who go on singing to their mates in peace, war, peace.
The ten-cent crocus bulb blooming in a used-car salesroom,
The horseshoe over the door, the luckpiece in the pocket.
The kiss and the comforting laugh and resolve—
Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder

The spring grass showing itself where least expected.
The rolling fluff of white clouds on a changeable sky.
The broadcast of strings from Japan, bells from Moscow,
Of the voice of the prime minister of Sweden carried
Across the sea in behalf of a world family of nations

And children singing chorals of the Christ child
And Bach being broadcast from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
And tall skyscrapers practically empty of tenants
And the hands of strong men groping for handholds
And the Salvation Army singing God love

From the People, Yes: Number 16 as published in the The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg: Revised and Expanded Edition (Harcourt, Brace and Co.; First Edition (October 14, 1970)

The kiss and the comforting laugh and resolve.

Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.

A heartspun word.

Hope is always just off yonder and strong men grope for handholds.

Got my luckpiece in my pocket.

when the only thing
got going for me is my
daily wordle streak

Wait for the alarm then turn it off before it goes off and out of bed.

Coffee started then into the shower.

Robe, coffee and tablet to start the day.

Bad yesterday.

Worse last night.

Then the headlines.

Somedays the only thing I got going for me is my 27 day wordle streak.

I know there will be days like this, always.

But why so many?

my whole being was
irradiated by a kind
of heavenly joy

I lived in solitude, surrounded by books on the history of religion, which have always been my favourite reading.

This may help to account for a curious episode that took place on one of my stays in the villino. I had a religious experience.

It took place in the Church of San Lorenzo, but did not seem to be connected with the harmonious beauty of the architecture.

I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before.

This state of mind lasted for several months, and, wonderful though it was, it posed an awkward problem in terms of action.

My life was far from blameless: I would have to reform.

My family would think I was going mad, and perhaps after all, it was a delusion, for I was in every way unworthy of receiving such a flood of grace.

Gradually the effect wore off, and I made no effort to retain it.

I think I was right; I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course.

But that I had “felt the finger of God’ I am quite sure, and, although the memory of this experience has faded, it still helps me to understand the joys of the saints.

Kenneth Clark in (The Other Half: A Self Portrait).

I actually came across the quote in opinion piece, The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be by David Brooks (Dec. 19, 2024 – New York Times)

Mr. Brooks writes: When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. Looking back over the decades, I remember rare transcendent moments at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn, at Chartres Cathedral in France, looking at images of the distant universe or of a baby in the womb. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.

The art historian Kenneth Clark, who was not religious, had one of these experiences at an Italian church: “I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before.”

I liked the quote so much I had to track it down in the original.

Maybe I have too many of these moments, listening to music or walking on the beach on along the road and I see things or hear things that are too much to be man made.

Maybe I go looking for them.

I walk the beach and think of God saying, ‘Just showing off.’

I think of another Kenneth Clark quote that went along the lines of, “… Man leaves his record in his words, his music and his art. Only the art doesn’t lie.”