“Oh no . . . I can’t afford any of those. At least not the fresh kind. All I can get is what’s in cans . . . from the Second Harvest place.”
Any of us might feel inclined to a sense of legitimate bewilderment: who wouldn’t know what a green bean looked like?
Then it struck me. Someone who’s been so poor their lives, someone so poor yet, that such basic food stuffs might always have been such unimaginable luxuries that there’d have been no reason for her to even try to think of them. It wouldn’t be all that different from me trying to suppose how it might feel as a passenger in a Ferrari along some Italian mountain road. Blindfold me and I wouldn’t be able to identify the make of the vehicle. The difference, the all consequent difference, is the difference between some hardworking American, too poverty stricken to recognize a basic food item and the physical and emotional sensations that accompany an experience that is absolutely disconnected form anything necessary.
How can this be? How is it that any of us can abide a social “value” that perpetuates those kind of business models: folks willing to work for their keep, folks actually working for their keep, and still unable to afford the basic needs of life?
Throughout the land, there are in this country multiples of tens of millions of people who are truly poor, who have not either decent or any housing, who truly cannot afford their “daily bread,” who lack the first part of minimal healthcare, who lack the means to educational access that might help them pull themselves from their tragic circumstances. According to testimony after sworn House and Senate testimony, from even the lips of John McCain, a John McCain who has actually voted against every bill or amendment that would expand veterans medical and educational benefits beyond the most shamefully penurious, has acknowledged that 30% of all homeless Americans are Vietnam and Gulf War I vets. Homeless men and women who were so utterly foolish as to serve their country when it called, and a hardworking woman who does not even recognize what most of us regard as the most common of common commodities: a fresh vegetable; a green bean, a head of cabbage, stalks of asparagus . . . because she has never in her life been able to afford them. Is this the America you’re proud of? Is this an America to be proud of?
I guess I’m asking myself those questions, as much as I am anyone else. They’re important questions, and they need to be answered.
Not the answer, though I believe it would contribute to an alleviation of much of the travail suffered by millions upon many millions of Americans now toiling, but still too poor to fully fend for themselves: 100% federal protection for those who would entertain the pros and cons of unionization, then 100% federal protection for those who voted to join a union. No retailer — not Wal-Mart, not Target, not Home Depot, not any national grocery chain, or anyone else — is going to close their doors in a “I’ll show them” pique, not when there’s a market to serve, when there’s a profit to be gotten. And no store will keep doors open, unionized or not, at a facility that isn’t turning a profit.
I already know Senator McCain’s position, on an entire swath of issues, and I am in true fear of him ascending to the presidency. So the only questions I now raise: Barack, where do you stand, and how strong is your stance?
— Ed Tubbs
Palm Springs, CA(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
