Over the weekend, we met an unusual person. He stood out from the "crowd" because the crowd in question had been gathered at a UU retreat in the San Bernardino mountains. We ran into this person on our way home when we stopped for lunch.

He asked where we were from and we told him about our wonderful family weekend with many people of our churches in the southwest division. We described how being in the mountains was a spiritual experience, forging connections among ourselves and with a greater universe, higher power, in the light of love, truth and justice.

He snorted. He smirked. He considered us pansies and wimps, he said. There ain't nothing in this world but feeding your face, sex with your woman, a case of beer, and money in your wallet.

We told him that we cared about people in need, the dispossessed, the hungry, the poor. He said if they were poor, if they were hungry, it was their own fault. They brought it on themselves. People, he said, needed to be more like him--take what they need and to the devil with the rest.

I think we kept talking to him because we were too shocked to get up and leave. Eventually we came to our senses and fled the scene.