A Thanksgiving Without Food

By Victoria A. Brownworth

The Super Committee failed. No surprise. It was set up to fail. Anyone who thought otherwise should have noted that a nanosecond after the bipartisan committee rendered its non-decision, President Obama was declaring it all the Republicans’ fault.

Except it was everyone’s fault: The President who seems to care more about re-election than the so-called 99 percent (and remember, he’s not one of the 99 percent–he’s a millionaire). The Republicans, who are and have been obstructionists for decades and only care about fiscal conservatism when it applies to someone else (and are also millionaires). The Democrats, who were entrusted with guarding the safety net for the most vulnerable Americans and decided not just to abdicate that responsibility, but pretend it wasn’t important at all (and who are also millionaires).

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) was one of the strongest members of the not-so-Super Committee, but was he thinking of Pennsylvanians from his obstructionist position on the committee?

Toomey isn’t from Philadelphia, he’s from the suburbs, and like every other member of Congress he’s a millionaire, so perhaps he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t want his personal taxes raised. But for him to keep his cushy millionaire tax breaks, kids in Philadelphia have to go hungry. Not his kids, but other people’s kids.

That’s right: a Thanksgiving (and Christmas, and all the days in between and after) without food, courtesy of Toomey and every other member of the committee and their leader, the President, who I and the majority of Philadelphians voted for. The entire Washington political collective–including everyone you and I have been voting for–is responsible for the ruination of this country and the sundering of what makes it different from other countries. The failure of the Super Committee is just one more glaring example of how Congress and the President put themselves and their own welfare above that of the rest of us, especially those of us with very, very little.

Every country has poor people. The difference is, in America, we are supposed to care what happens to them. Does Pat Toomey care? Does anyone else on that committee? Does the President?

I don’t mean “care” as an abstraction. Of course they all “care.” Toomey talks all the time about being pro-life, so of course he “cares”  about kids going hungry. Other members of the committee “care.” The President “cares.”

They just aren’t willing to make caring anything but an abstraction. 

Philadelphia is the poorest big city in America. The poorest of the ten most populous cities. The one in which more children are going hungry than in any other.

Did Pat Toomey think about those kids when he was doing his obstructionist dance on the Super Committee? Did any of the other members? Patty Murray (D-WA) was allegedly the most liberal member of the committee while Toomey was the most conservative. Couldn’t the two of them find common ground in children going to bed and waking up and going to school and coming home hungry in America?

Really? They couldn’t unite over hungry children–the future of our nation?

Some reading this will argue that the Super Committee was about other things and hungry kids wasn’t one of them and this is just more liberal-progressive-extremist cant.

Except, well, it’s not.

How did Philadelphia become the poorest big city in America? Did poor people make it that way or did the people in power make it that way? For 25 years I have been writing in this city about the same things: corruption and poverty, poverty and corruption. And greed. A whole lot of greed.

Here’s what I know. Kids have several days off from school for Thanksgiving. That’s several days without school lunches, several days without heat, several days without running water. Because in the poorest big city in America, one in three–take that in for a minute, one in three–kids is going hungry and may be living in a place with no heat or water and school is the one place where there will always be a meal and always be heat and always be a place to wash your hands and face.

Except that the President has said and Congress has agreed, that we need more shared sacrifice. Which means more kids going hungry.

Many of us will be with family and friends on Thanksgiving. There will be a big meal with way more food than any of us can or should eat. But all over Philadelphia there will be people with nothing. Not with less, but with nothing.

Why don’t these people matter?

Here’s what happens when kids don’t eat properly: Their brains freeze. They stop. They don’t grow. They don’t expand. They don’t become the brains of kids who can grow up to have brains. They become the brains of kids who grow up to not be as smart as their peers who got three balanced meals a day, whose mothers fed them milk and fresh fruit and vegetables and the whole grains that feed brains.

Kids whose mothers are desperately trying to figure out how to turn a can of beans and a can of soup into dinner aren’t getting the brain food they need. Kids whose mothers can’t afford fresh fruit and vegetables and whole grains can’t think as well as their peers. And when kids can’t think, they do stupid stuff. They end up in trouble and eventually in jail. It may sound simplistic, but starve a kid today and you may end up jailing him tomorrow.

Between Sept. 2008 and Sept. 2011, hunger increased in Philadelphia by 40 percent. Between Sept. 2010 and Sept. 2011, hunger increased by seven percent.  According to the Hunger Coalition, 125,000 households in Philadelphia must either reduce the size of the family’s meal or skip meals totally because there isn’t enough food.

Nationally, one in seven Americans is currently on food stamps. One in six is living in poverty. In Philadelphia that number is one in three. A third of the people living in poverty in Philadelphia are elderly. Close to half of those living in poverty are children. Over 30 percent of Philadelphians receive food stamps and the Hunger Coalition notes that an additional 100,000 are income-eligible. (Overall, 14 percent of Pennsylvanians receive food stamps.)

Food insufficiency is the new word for hunger. It means we don’t have Third World-style starvation in America; you aren’t going to see scenes in Philadelphia like the scenes currently playing out in Kenya and Ethiopia. But when a child goes to bed without food night after night, it doesn’t matter if he/she is living in the Third World or the First World. What matters is that her or his brain is dying from lack of food, her kidneys are shutting down little by little, his skin is getting dry and less elastic and more prone to infection.

But “food insufficiency” doesn’t sound all that worrisome. And yet it’s no different from outright hunger. It means families do not know where or when they will have food. It means constant uncertainty. It means that some children will be growing up in the richest nation in the world not knowing where their next meal is coming from. Ever.

Think about that. Are you hungry right now, as you read this? What if no food was available to you as it isn’t to so many Philadelphians?

Members of the Super Committee aren’t concerned about that. They don’t care if you or your children are hungry. And the President keeps saying we all have to share the sacrifice. But aren’t hungry children already sacrificing enough? In September, the House voted to cut SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly food stamps) by $127 billion and to cut $733 million from the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program. Yet these two programs feed millions of hungry children.

There’s a disconnect between hunger in America and hunger abroad. The federal government sends billions in foreign aid to help children starving in other countries. But when it comes to our own children, a hard-heartedness sets in. Do we blame people for being poor and hungry? The mere fact that we refer to safety net programs as “entitlements” implies that we do–that we think undeserving people are getting something for nothing.

One in ten Americans is currently jobless. Another 17 percent are underemployed. We’re in the worst economy since the Great Depression which many of us grew up hearing our parents and grandparents talk about in hushed tones. People have nowhere to turn to for help but the government. Should children really be punished because their parents can’t provide for them? Why do our hearts break for African children in the midst of famine, but not the hidden hungry children in our own land of plenty?

Philadelphia is the birthplace of American democracy. There was a plan here by the Founding Fathers to make an egalitarian society in which we all had an equal part, an equal say, a chance.  

What happened? When did political intransigence of the sort we have seen from the Super Committee, the President and Congress become more important than our hungry children?

Philadelphia didn’t get poor overnight. We didn’t advertise for poor people and bus them in from elsewhere. The middle class bottomed out of our city and what was left was poverty.

But Philadelphia isn’t alone in this disturbing economic development. Poverty has increased by 103 percent in the surrounding suburbs of Chester, Montgomery and Delaware counties in the past year alone. All due to the recession. The new face of hunger is fast becoming suburban.

Pat Toomey had a chance to stop the suffering of hungry children in Philadelphia, in his own suburban enclave and across the country, but instead he chose to close his ears to their cries. Now there will be another Thanksgiving without food, but not for Toomey or his children. Because the children of millionaires never go hungry. Only ours do.

Follow me on Twitter @VABVOX or read my political blog at www.victoriabrownworth.com