Children Going Hungry In America

I LIVE IN the wealthiest part of a relatively poor state, although arguably every state in these United States is, by global standards, quite wealthy. In my area, there has been an economic and population boom the entire forty years I have lived here. The population of the town I moved to forty years ago has more than doubled since my arrival, from about forty thousand to close to one hundred thousand. The surrounding area, both the very small and larger towns have experienced the same sort of growth. Hundreds of new businesses have sprung up, major corporations have expanded immensely, small roads have become super highways, as about forty people per day move into this very pleasant part of the country, bringing energy and money with them, making this one of the fastest growing areas in the United States. The land of opportunity. And yet, fifteen to twenty percent of the children in the area experience food insecurity on a regular basis, a deplorable, damning fact. A similar situation exists everywhere in the United States, with much worse statistics in many areas. This, in a nation which by many measure is the world's wealthiest, a nation which annually produces twice as much food as it needs, and throws half of it away. A nation in which fully one third of the adult population is obese. A nation in which eighty percent of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of twenty percent of the population, and nealy half in the hands of the top one percent. A nation in which twenty percent of the children experience food insecurity, meaning that nobody knows, from day to day, where their next meal is coming from. This, despite massive nationwide food assistance efforts, such as the S.N.A.P. and food bank programs which, though well intentioned, remain less than fully effective. Conservatives, of course, tend to blame it all on poorly performing parents, and to leave it at that. When traditinal, existing systems, primarily economic and political, fail, conservatives tend to turn away from the failure and to accuse those in need of laziness, or worse. Who should they blame for throwing away half the nation's food? Should they include themselves in the blame game? The pandemic has laid bare the many forms of needless, imposed, extreme inequality in American society, including systemic racism, which, though obvious, the existence of which conservatives are prone to deny. The massive tears and rents, tha gaping wounds in the social fabric of the nation are largely driven by race, always driven by class; the fact that the United States is a society with class distinctions being often overlooked amid the conservative mythology that we live in a "classless" society. Humanity produces enough food annually to feed everone on the planet, and yet hunger and starvatoin, although having been somewhat reduced in recent years, remain endemic. That we the people of planet Earth fail to adequatley feed and hosue everyone is our shame. It is the failure of our political and economic systems, which beg for needed reform but do not get it; rampant unregulated corporate profit seeking capitalism, and government inneficiency, misguided policies favoring the wealthy who own and control the systems, and corruption. Late in Albert Einstein's life he was asked to contribute a message to a time capsule that would be opened one hundred years hence. Roughly paraphrased, he wrote: "If you have not become kinder and more compassionate than we were, may the devil take you". The date is rapidly approaching.