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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)..Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. Brendan Gill......I live in Los Angeles. Novelist. Single. One great kid, Katy age 18. Shes at UCSB. Mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually fit; growing stronger and healthier every day.I believe, as a country, as a people, we now all have a great chance at a new start. One where we learn and grow from our mistakes and forgive others as we should forgive ourselves. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love is real. All you need is love. I believe EP said it best.... "Forget the past. Move forward. Eat right. Exercise. Love again." I went for the fences this time. Is there any real shame in that. My 2nd book, Common Cents is a Civil War story that compares homelessness to slavery. We have taken an entire race of people and forgotten about them and thrown them away. How is this possible in the richest country on the planet?From Common Cents...."Hitler killed six million Jews. There are nearly that many homeless people on the streets. Who is the villain here? We are killing these people on the installment plan. Hitler was just a little more efficient and expeditious in his racism."and then there is....."As I was in the beginning stages of the novel, I began to speculate on the conditions of the slaves before the Civil War. I conceived of a scenario where in the future a child would be looking at newsreels of the late 20th Century. He would ask his grandfather, “Grandfather, why did the people of the late 20th Century let all those poor people live like that? Don't they see all those people living on the street and eating garbage?” >Looking back from a historical point of view, I realized the homeless problem might appear to civilized people in the future, much as the way we look at the old daguerreotypes of slaves and slave-owners. When it is all around you, when a situation such as slavery or homelessness is an everyday occurrence, it becomes a non-issue, much in the manner of Hitler's henchmen shooting Jewish prisoners, while the decent, God- fearing citizens of Germany looked on with detachment.After making that connection, only then did I begin to get a handle on how we, as a people, can look at our own relatives and neighbors eating garbage and freezing to death in front of our very eyes, while remaining detached. We are not evil people, we are still Christians but we have become used to situations that no longer shock us. From a historical perspective, looking back at these occurrences, they might seem inhumane and inconceivable. It is like the traffic outside our high-rise apartment windows; we just get used to it.