It is Lent, and as such there are soup suppers every Wednesday evening at church. Last Wednesday I was late, after picking up The Daughter from the train station, and get a small bowl of potato soup. That and a roll was dinner on Wednesday. And if I had been at home that night, dinner would have been about the same.
On the tables are table tents from Bread for the World, a hunger advocacy organization I deeply admire. I pick one up and take a look. The Bible verses are not surprising. Nore the prayer. It is the reflection that I pick up on almost immediately:
Lent is a time to remember those who live in a desert not of their choosing, those who have been deserted and long forgotten. (Lawrence Cunningham, emeritus professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame)
A time to remember those who live in a desert not of their own choosing.
And here is one of the great problems of our society. We have forgotten that very few people chose to be poor. Or sick. Or homeless.
Once upon a time, this was a country where we looked at our poor, and took up the challenge to change things for them. Today, we look at the poor and declare them lazy.
And when I say that we once looked at the poor and tried to create change for them, I don't just mean LBJ's Great Society, or FDR's New Deal. Lincoln is widely remembered as the president who ended slavery. But he also signed into law one of the first homeownership bills in our nation's history. The Homestead Act became law in 1862, and provided adult with 160 acres of newly opened land in the West, if they filed the paperwork and paid a small fee. They had to build a 12 by 14 dwelling on the land, and they had to show that they had never taken up arms against the US Government, and work the land for five years in order to become the full owner. This of course kept a lot of southerners out after the Civil War, but that is a different discussion.
The idea behind homesteads was simple: provide land for those farmers who were willing to farm it. Small farmers. NOT plantation farmers. And of course, the system was badly abused, especially by the cattle industry, which filed fictitious claims around water sources and then kept farmers and other ranchers from using the water.
Which is to say, we have always had people who cheat the system.
We have a name for such people: welfare queen.
Reagan popularized the term in 1976 while running for president. In speech after speech he said: There's a woman in Chicago; She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security Cards . . . She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.'
There is just one problem: she didn't exist. I don't know if Reagan made her up, if his speechwriter made her up or what, but she didn't exist.
But in that moment, Ronald Reagan, fan of Ayn Rand, told Americans that they were all being duped by those lousy welfare cheats.
This last election season, we heard the story again . . .
"I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money"
Rick Santorum in a speech in Iowa.
"Over here you have a policy which, with Reagan and me as speaker, created millions of jobs — it's called paychecks. Over here you have the most successful food stamp president in American history, Barack Obama," said Newt Gingrich.
So, let's back up a minute. Because food stamps are not about "giving you somebody else's money" any more than the Homestead Act was about giving away someone else's land.
We have about 43 million people living on food stamps in this country. But less than 10% of them are on full welfare benefits. That means that 39 million people on food stamps are . . . children, the working poor and seniors. People who are not lazy. Because they have jobs, or retired from jobs, or are too young for jobs--they just cannot survive without a helping hand. The same people who make up the majority of clients at food banks.
The largest employer of people who receive food stamps in this nation? Walmart. Those low, low prices come at a cost to the American public. In a study of 24 states, Walmart was the largest employer of working poor who received state and federal aid in the form of food stamp and health care benefits. Next time you go to Walmart, ask yourself if the person who stocks the shelves or runs the check out stand is getting food stamps.
These are not welfare queens, they are your neighbors. Your EMPLOYED neighbors But we don't like to think of the poor as our neighbor. OR our friend. Or the person who sits next to us in the pew at church.
And there is a reason for that: IF we accept that our neighbor, friend or the person who sells us our food at the local store makes so little money that they need food stamps and/or food banks to get by, we also have to accept that it could be US in that spot.
We forget how many of us are a paycheck or two from being there. It is a lesson that the Great Recession should have taught us, but did not. So many Americans lost their jobs, their homes, and saw their families shatter and scatter. And yet, even now, many clamor for cuts to the programs that assist those who lost everything due to nothing they did--but largely due to the excesses of the marketplace.
We like to believe that people who lose everything did something wrong, which is simply not always the case. The largest single reason for bankruptcies in this country is medical costs. You file for bankruptcy because you cannot pay your medical bills. What, you got cancer on purpose?
We want it to be the fault of the person who is poor, who is struggling. Not because it makes us feel superior (although, yes, for some people it does), but because it makes us feel secure. Surely we would never make the mistakes that that person made. We would never be in that position.
Lent is a time to remember those who live in a desert not of their own choosing.
Let me put it another way. Some of us are poor. Some of us struggle with depression. Some of us struggle with addiction. Some of us are lonely. Some of us are scared of everything. Some of us are angry. Some of us are sick with cancer or AIDS or some other terrible, potentially terminal disease.
But all of us live in a desert not of our own choosing from time to time. It may not be the poverty desert, but we will each live in one or more deserts in our life. We have become good at deciding which deserts are socially acceptable, and which are not, because it makes us feel better about ourselves. But it doesn't make it right.
It is easier to judge others. It is harder to not judge at all, and simply offer friendship and a hand to the person you see in need. It is hard to remember those who are in need. It is easier, more culturally acceptable to think only of our own needs.
In America, the hungry, the poor, the homeless have long been demonized and damned. Deserted and forgotten. It is time we walked side by side with them.
Today I ate left over spaghetti, an apple, two baby oranges, and a sweet potato. A glass of milk. And water. This cost me very little of my food stores. But I am hungry, so I made a little rice for an evening snack. And am still hungry.
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