I wonder sometimes if anyone has given serious thought to the potential good and the potential harm our actions or inactions have on persons touched by such an effect.

Many people by their own motivations have smiled at others, and spoken kind words and greetings to them.

Sometimes they were people they did not know and would not likely see again.

This kindness could have happened to someone who might have been suffering very personal and serious pain. Perhaps that was the worst period of time in that person’s life and they were wondering how it would feel to be without the pain.

Perhaps the kindness shown this person at that time on that day gave them enough of a warm feeling that they began to remember, just slightly, how wonderful life can be when we’re not in the depths of pain.

So it makes me wonder what would have happened if the one in pain that day passes no one who gave kind words, smiles and greetings. No one who expressed to him a sense of caring. It is the caring that makes a diference to live in a world of hopelessness, dark feelings of depression or one of dreams of the future of courage and hope of life and love.

We all know these things. At least I think we do. So how could we leave them so far away from dreams of the future of courage and hope? One could ask what it is that moves us from the natural feelings of hope to one of despair. I am sure there’s more than one thing but what comes to my mind is the destructive power of alcohol and drugs.

Now it is true, of course, all people who drink are not problems to society but it is also true that people who develop problems with substance abuse cost all society enormous amounts of money and manpower plus untold mega-tons of creative power and visions. In my mind, the biggest loss, the loss most difficult to recover, is the loss of the visions and dreams.

These are the energies, the forces, that drive us to creative power. The creativeness helps develop industry, commerce, medicine and other ways to resolve the many issues of the human condition.

Therefore, it behooves us to consider that those who profit from such destruction, the drug dealers and the boot leggers whose combined insidious ways have led many a good person into their corrupted, tainted image – many of the profiteers deal their deaths thinking they are just giving a service to people in need and have very short-lived responsibility for their actions.

Not so, I think. If a person sold to one of those in need of crack cocaine, and they died from its use, or sold another bootleg booze and they died from its use, would they not have some responsibility for guidance that some person’s children would not receive or the children they would have had or the lives they would have influenced in a positive fashion.

If God is real, and he is, then sin must also be real for He tells us so; then perhaps the greatest of all sins could be the sins committed against the children directly or indirectly.

Guilt by omission or commission is still guilt. If the little pieces of wood, leather, beads and thread make up something we like to called a dream catcher, then I think we could consider something that makes sense to me. We are the Dream Catchers.

Both you and I have a great responsibility to create by our own actions. We interpret the dreams by the feeling in our bones and if we are under the influence of drugs (alcohol being a drug) how could we interpret a dream or for that matter even have a dream much less a vision?

I found in Webster’s dictionaries the word “consequence.” It says, “the natural result from a preceding condition or action,” the effect.

Perhaps, the consequence of dealing in alcohol/drugs is not just to answer for an illegal act in violating society’s laws, but a broader deeper even more serious consequence of violating the Laws of God.

It is my hope, my wish and my prayer that the unfortunate souls who are pushing drugs and dealing illegal booze look within themselves and find a new understanding of the depth of their actions.