Image by April Moord
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Lost Souls
Spiritually, about half the populace in the United States congress, has clearly lost their way.
Completely.
They claim to adhere to the Christian values of mercy and charity, but instead, they worship money. They are so far removed from the suffering, poverty, hunger, and despair of ‘the least among us,’ that they actually consider cutting $40 million dollars from the Food Stamp budget (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), a victory.
217 men and women in Congress — who’ve never been hungry or cold or homeless or desperate in their whole lives — cut the money that feeds 47 million Americans, many of them children.
They claim that all children should be valued. That all life is sacred. Yet, they spit in the faces of those who most need our help.
Stealing from those least able to withstand the loss.
I am disgusted. I am beyond disgusted. I am outraged.
I am outraged that there are veterans and teachers and office workers and toddlers who are going to bed hungry in a nation that claims to be altruistic and caring.
According to the World Food Programme, “$3.2 billion is needed each year to reach all 66 million hungry school-age children.” $3.2 billion. A drop in the bucket. (In comparison, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost 3.7 trillion dollars as of 2011.)
It horrifies me that we are willing to give welfare to big agriculture, subsidies to big oil, and millions and millions in tax refunds and rebates to extremely profitable corporations, year after year after year, and yet remain unwilling to make sure that school children have a good breakfast, or that veterans coming home from Afghanistan can provide food for their families.
Hunger in this day and age, is an obscenity.
I am sick of the judgment and shaming of the poor.
I am sick of men and women with no capacity for empathy, thinking that they are superior to those who are hungry or struggling in this economy.
I am dog tired of reading about how small government should be, about how we should ‘drown it in a bathtub,’ about how healthcare is a privilege, and clean drinking water is not a human right.
People with these views have lost their way. They are sleep-walking, hopelessly moored in false ideology.
If life is about winning, then they have lost everything that has value.
Everything: Goodness. Kindness. Care.
Instead, they claim moral superiority over those whose lives are ruptured and messy and in the ditch. Really.
What about grace? What about mercy?
It never occurs to them to consider the phrase, “There but for the grace of God, go I.“
Instead, they seem to believe that God has chosen them to teach other less fortunate schmucks, a lesson. Get it together. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Make do. Find your own way. Do without. Not my problem. Go f*ck yourself.
Still. Remember, we are talking about taking food out of the mouths of children. We are talking about starving the future. We are talking about shaming, blocking, and marking them with the scarlet phrase: You are poor. You won’t amount to anything. You exist to serve us, and only us. You exist simply to be our worker bees, our domestics, and our military might.
Snap, snap.
But, hunger is not a game.
The real consequence of wide-spread hunger is the possibility that we will lose a whole generation of kids, in terms of their brain development and potential.
Way to go, Congress-cirtters!
To score a few cheap, political points, you just threw our future under the bus.
© 2013 Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved
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