Social Evils
 
Vultures
For whose benefit is this liquor business?
 
Fr Augustine Mundackat VC

 
(--Picture of a drunkard lying senseless in broad daylight outside a bar--)
 
When I saw the above picture in the Hindu (July 6) the words from Lamentations in the Bible came rushing to my mind: "How the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold is changed! The sacred stones lie scattered at the head of every street" (Lam 4:1)

At all times all over the world alcohol has wrought destruction. Alcohol degrades man, created in the image and likeness of God, and makes him like an animal.

The wages earned after a day’s hard labour is meant for feeding the family, treating the sick at home, clothing the children, getting the daughters married. Everything is destroyed by alcohol.
 
 
...Alcohol-

It is poison.
How many
human lives
are snuffed out!
How many
children rendered
orphans!
How many
women widowed!
How many
families abandoned
on the streets!
When will this diabolical
bondage be broken?
How many more lives
have to be sacrificed?
O you alcohol baron,
does your food
not taste of blood
shed mercilessly?
In this land,
most of the tears shed
in all the places of worship
are those of lamentation
for drunkards,
of prayer for
their conversion-
of mothers, of wives,
of children.
Is this not true?
Who will bear,
the burden of this sin,
of this curse? Who?
Who will expiate it?
The lives of those
who gulp down this poison?
Or the government
who nurtures this destruction?
Or the Abkaris who thrive
and fatten their lives
on this feast of death?


"Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Those who linger late over wine, those who keep trying mixed wines... At the last it bites like a serpent, and stings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind utter perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast. ‘They struck me,’ you will say, but I was not hurt; they beat me, but I did not feel it" (Prov 23:29-35).