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While Rip and I had been talking, there was sporadic activity going on around us. Some of the people who had been in the dining area when we first came, were now gone. From time to time, other individuals had arrived to take their places in a figurative, and sometimes literal, sense.

The people came in alone and, then, left alone. For the most part, they sat alone and ate in silence.

What these people thought or felt or hoped or feared was a mystery. They were like phantoms who suddenly materialized and then vanished, and, yet, one knew they did not really disappear except from our minds and hearts.

Their life stories were their own, and perhaps this story was the only possession that many of them had. For a variety of reasons, many of which undoubtedly were rooted in their hidden histories, they kept their distance from most other human beings.

Like all of us, they were trying to find a way to survive the twenty-four hours of each day. However, one of the differences between them and the rest of us was they somehow managed to accomplish the feat of survival with no home, no job, virtually no resources, no family support and few, if any, friends.

I wondered about whether or not I could duplicate their accomplishment if required to do so. I had my doubts about the successful outcome, if one could call it that, of such a challenge.

Dostoevsky had once said words to the effect that the quality of treatment extended to the inmates of a country's prisons is an indication of the degree of civilization inherent in such a society. Surely, the quality of treatment extended to the homeless, who have committed no crime, is an even more fundamental index of the degree of civility present in a given country.

If one were to apply such an index to America and many other countries in the developed world, then, as a civilization we were all failing at an increasingly accelerated rate. If, in addition to homelessness, one added issues such as hunger, poverty, racism, medical care, community mental health, substance abuse, criminal justice, and the environment, to the 'civility index', one might be hard pressed to figure out on what grounds we considered ourselves to be civilized.

In conjunction with my musings about the 'civility index', a particular work of another writer drifted into awareness. I began to think about Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The story was about a young man of some social standing whose portrait was painted by a friend. Prior to the painting of the portrait, the individual seemed to be a decent, likeable, thoughtful person.

Due to a variety of, mostly unspecified, forces operating in the life of the young man, after the portrait has been completed, the young man begins to lead an increasingly morally corrupt life. This slide downward on the scale of humanity involves various acts of cruelty, selfishness and insensitivity in relation to different people in his life.

With each new act of inhumanity and with each new descent into the depths of moral turpitude, the young man notices that the portrait is changing in parallel with his increasingly corrupt state. The portrait has become a mirror for his soul.

Outwardly, the young man remains urbane, charming, handsome, and attractive. Yet, inwardly, the man's soul has become ugly, festering, odious and repulsive. The horror of his inner moral condition is being given visible expression in the changing character of his portrait's appearance.

Realizing what is going on, the young man hides the portrait away in an upper room of his house in order to keep the truth from others. However, from time to time, out of a morbid compulsion, he visits the room where the portrait is being kept in order to view the changing record of his continuing departure away from the life of a civilized, decent, moral human being.

Eventually, the young man becomes so repelled and offended by what he sees in the portrait's changing record of his internal degradation that he slashes the portrait again and again in order to destroy the portrait's reflection of his condition and its constant manner of reminding him about what he has become.

Upon the shredding of the portrait, the young man dies. Moreover, in death, his countenance comes to give expression to the reality of what the portrait had been disclosing throughout his downward journey into the depths of giving active expression to the human potential for evil.

As I thought about Oscar Wilde's story, I wondered in whose attic, the portrait of America was being kept. I wondered what grotesque form such a portrait had now assumed.

On the surface, like the focal character in the story, we Americans like to present our country to others, if not to ourselves, as a charming, charismatic, urbane, witty, intelligent, democratic, religious and morally decent nation. Yet, this public image is totally at odds with the realities of what our country has done to native peoples, blacks, women, the tired, the poor, the hungry, the sick and the homeless. The public myth of America is totally contradicted by what America has done, or permitted to be done, in Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere.

I wondered if the time was coming when we might follow the example of the character in Oscar Wilde's story. I wondered if the time was coming when we would reach our limit for being able to live with the repellant and offensive image that the hidden portrait of America was reflecting back to our compulsive gaze of horror.

I wondered if the time was coming when we no longer would be able to tolerate the manner in which the soul of America was becoming increasingly disfigured and degraded by America's domestic and international actions. I wondered if the time was coming when we would seek to destroy the portrait, only to discover that in the process of destroying it, we, like the character in Oscar Wilde's story, must die and that, in death, the realities of our nation's sins would become visible upon our collective, prostrate bodies.

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