Ah the innumerable distractions in which we are continuously engulfed!!! Currently, a Marvel comics cinematic episode is generating obscene profits and most recently yet another installment of Mission Impossible is currently being screened in theaters throughout the land.

Omorosa and “the Donald” sink to previously uninhabited nadirs of mutual insult and condemnation. Democrats seek to finalize an electoral message that shall in its efficacy mobilize those in the “resistance” to reclaim a majority in the House of Representatives, and the much more daunting task of retaking the Senate as well, in the mid-term elections that draw ever nearer.

As the summer commences its inevitable trajectory toward autumn Americans engage in travel, relaxation, and rejuvenation, and a myriad array of pleasurable distractions and diversions which annually comprise a most deserved vacation period, that requires little of us other than our presence and a predisposition to dispense with substantive intellectual inquiry.

The unceasing venomous disputes that rage among us that are reflected in the fevered swamps of social media and among those who hold forth each day on Fox and CNN and other electronic outlets where ad hominum and gratuitous attacks dominate the dialogue.

Cable television regales us with an ever-expanding menu of entries that glorify and extol the grotesque materialism of the Khardashians and others in our populace who live with a vacuity and a moral obtuseness that is unparalleled.

Netflix, and even more recent competitors for our visual and auditory loyalty extend the frontiers of sexual license and barbaric cruelty, as a national audience sheds its normative sensibilities and a capacity for an empathetic acknowledgement of the tragic human circumstances in which so many who live among us our ensnared.

However, among all of the preceding realities that are extant perhaps the most disturbing contemporary fact is the insularity, self-absorption, and apathy that is embodied in our cultural consciousness and in our companionate disregard and dismissal of those ethical obligations incumbent upon us as citizens of a sorely aggrieved and unraveling society.

For irrespective of the theologies we embrace or the values we cherish which have as their sources humanistic prescriptions, at their epicenter are those crucial obligations that our lives and our labors must be committed to the exertions required to transform the content and quality of life of the tens of millions of Americans who live in squalor, misery, and hopelessness.

Thus on this day the midpoint of August I ask of all who encounter this treatise the following interrogatory: Will you commit your energies and your fealty in the months that remain in this the year of 2018 to an engagement with an organization or entity be it local or national in its scope of operation and influence which seeks as its objective the diminishment of poverty in the United States?

Will you provide whatever material resources are feasible to this cause? Will you attempt to persuade those within the orbit of your family and the circle of your friends and acquaintances to replicate your involvement with institutions of their choosing?

Penultimately, will you unstintingly embrace the central concept that contains two elements of undeniable veracity, i.e. that our society possesses the requisite financial and intellectual capabilities to eradicate poverty; and that all that is necessary to achieve this most laudable and imperative objective is the collective  explicit volition of our citizens and their derivative commitment to do so.

Finally, will you pledge that you shall not cease your activity in this effort until this reality is reflected as the most prominent organic and transcendent dynamic that is operative in this the American democratic experience.

Let us all dedicate or recommit ourselves to this glorious and noble task and commence our efforts immediately.