Sunday, October 28, 2012

Who Is Poor?

What are we to make of the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 32 million to 47 million in the past three years? Every sixth American is dining courtesy of the rest of us. That seems incomprehensible in the wealthiest nation on earth, that 16% of us need to be fed by the rest. Meanwhile, obesity remains a major health concern and it would be exceedingly rare to find an actual hungry person on an American street.

And we are generous in feeding our kids, too. Plenty of students get two or three meals a day at school, many at reduced prices or free, subsidized by the taxpayers. Out of our 52 million school age children - those aged 5 to 17 - about 31 million are getting lunch on us. That means that about 60% of America doesn't accept the responsibility for feeding its own children.  So, it's up to us. Yet, I don't think anybody minds feeding the hungry. 

The problem begins when we ask who is truly needy? Is it the girl who is showing her friends her new IPhone5 as she hands the teacher her free lunch paperwork? Is it the boy wearing the $300 stereo headphones as he gives the teacher the documentation of his family's inability to provide food for him? At what point are we no longer generous but merely being played for suckers?

It seems that Americans have completely lost touch with the ugly reality of poverty.  I am old enough that my youth and outlook was shaped by people who lived through the Great Depression.  I remember hearing my grandfather talk about plowing a neighbor's fields for two days, so that he might borrow their mules for one day's plowing. He talked about subsisting on pinto beans and corn bread for weeks at a time. He was pleased to be able to get a nickel's worth of baloney and crackers for lunch when he went to work in the coal mines. 

I feel like most of the current generation, those who enjoy government largess and live on the backs of the rest of America, these people don't know what it is to be hungry, to be cold, to be scared of whether or not there will be baloney or crackers or beans tomorrow.  My grandfather foresaw this.  He told me before he died (in 1983) that if there were another Depression, that people wouldn't docilely stand in line for survival rations - soup, beans, cheese, rice, bread - but they would be violent and take what they wanted.

I listened to my grandpa. But I never thought I would see it.  Now I wonder.

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