Finding refuge: Few places left to secure one's life and soul from growing turmoil of outside world

When I told some folks recently that I was up on Legislative Plaza trying to encourage support for expanding the eligibility of poor children for charter public schools, they remarked that it must be exciting.

No, it is quite depressing.

It's not that I'm dumping on legislators. They inherited the system that they're trying to do some good in. But the day I was up there, it resembled a circus, except for the lack of elephants -- physical not political ones.

How the common person is supposed to be heard while Chief Serpas is holding another one of his ego-building press conferences is beyond me. And then there were the cute Brownies handing out cookies to stop the puppy mills.

I hate newsrooms, too. My former profession stinks the most of all the four estates that are supposed to be the pillars of our society. The print side truly has betrayed its First Amendment responsibilities for stock prices and corporate bonuses. AIG would fit right in at most newspapers in this nation, including The Tennessean and Gannett.

I also hate courts with all the attorneys and judges and how they have made that world only accessible to their own designs and profitmaking. WWJD in 2009? He would take the rod to every courthouse in this land. Truly, they have become dens for thieves after the hard-earned income of Tennesseans at the most vulnerable points of their lives.

Yet I know some very good human beings who are lawyers and judges.

As for the clergy, I await their response to the crisis in this land. They've got the operations' and repair manual. It's time to sell some church property, perhaps, and downscale the size of some operations that are more for man than God.

Among the movers and shakers in our state and nation, I find little from which to draw comfort that right will prevail and wrong will fail, as the old Christmas hymn promises.

As times become more desperate economically, dishonesty increases and the culture of the dollar prevails over common decency and even the law. I truly have been shocked from what I have discovered personally about the incestuous divorce industry in this state and nation.

Worse, I am stunned at how that industry is allowed to devour the very hearts and souls of the women who gave birth to the children in cruel custody rulings. Without any cause and evidence whatsoever presented by judges, these women are not only losing custody but the very right to even have phone contact with their babies.

Is there no shame?

Is there no honor?

Is there no fear of God's wrath over this abuse of the widow and the orphan, because that is what the courts are making of these caregivers and their children.

I pray every day, several times a day. I go to church several times a week. I pray my mother's Rosary daily.

But as with Tennessee's corrupt divorce industry, this state and nation are sinking into the kind of depravity that makes so many victims and leaves so few people unharmed and undamaged.

I guess it was Edmund Burke who said that for evil to triumph, good people have to do nothing.

Dr. King, our greatest American, told us that history's judgment would not be most harsh on the children of darkness and their vicious deeds -- but on the children of light and what they failed to do in response.

I am waiting on the children of light to make their presence felt. The darkness is descending so rapidly now that I fear we will never see the dawn once more.

Someone please show the way for shelter from the growing storm.