The Deep End

Other than Alaska, I’ve traveled to every state in the Union, most of them more than once. It’s been a busy forty-five years, and I’ve lost count of how many motels, hotels, bed and breakfasts, cabins, and travel lodges I’ve stayed in. When I first started traveling, I thought it was fun; I’d even toyed with the idea of getting a matchbook from each place I stayed in or some sort of souvenir to remember the trip, but it soon lost its glamour.

There are only so many lumpy beds, smelly rooms, odd receptionists, and overly exuberant next-door neighbors you can stomach before it becomes a drag. I even caught the tail end of the massage bed craze, where you put a couple of quarters into a machine on the side of the bed, and you get to experience what riding a mechanical bull must feel like for a few minutes.  Even with my excessive travel, however, I’ve never stayed at a Ritz Carlton.

Budget motels were more my speed, you know, the super 8, the motel 6, an odd La Quinta here or there, even Howard Johnsons back in the day, but never the Ritz. I figured any hotel chain they wrote songs about was likely out of my price range, but then again, I wasn’t homeless in California.

I’ve been following the absurdity known as California legislature for a while now, having lived there back in the day. By all accounts, they’re no longer wading in the kiddie pool of crazy, they’ve decided to go all out, and cannonball into the deep end.

Not only is the state commandeering high-end hotels for the homeless in California, but they are also providing them with alcohol, marijuana, and methadone free of charge because you can’t enjoy 700 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets when you’ve got the shakes or the jitters.

I guess it pays to be homeless in California. It’s not as though they’re commandeering the Lamplight Inn, or Lenny’s Budget Oasis, they’re going for the premium hotels, as though the homeless would take one look at a Budget Inn, and prefer to go back to sleeping in their own filth under some overpass.

For those of you keeping score at home, thus far hardened criminals, including child abusers, are being freed from prison, and tax paying citizens are being jailed. The homeless are residing in the Ritz with free booze and weed delivery, and the no longer working because the local government said they had to shut down are waiting in miles long food lines hoping they get a bag of beans and rice before they run out.

What about this makes any sense at all? What about this is rational, reasonable, or logical?

The average Joe is growing more indignant with each passing day, and rightly so. There is an obvious and glaring unfairness to all this that just gnaws and eats away at one’s civility, and this is just the beginning. We’re seeing the locomotive of this particular crazy train, not the caboose. With every new lunacy that gets floated by dolts in suits still getting their salaries because they’re essential, those being forced to sit home and twiddle their thumbs or run the risk of being tasered by overzealous self-important lackeys, are growing more impatient and angry.

The pressure is building, and there is no release valve. Rather than walk back some of the rhetoric, it is being amplified, and although there is nothing you or I can do to stop it, we can prepare. What that preparedness looks like is entirely up to you, but if I may offer an unsolicited piece of advice, make sure the spiritual is squared away before the physical is. If the just shall live by faith, and men’s hearts will fail them for fear of what is to come, then it is holiness unto God that we must pursue first and foremost, for only when walking in holiness can the peace of God encompass you. What have you to fear if God is on your side? What have you to cling to and trust in if He isn’t? Everything that can be shaken will be shaken. And when God says everything, He means everything!

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.