Most of us understand we are the richest nation in the world.
Even the most poverty stricken among us have jobs, apartments and homes, flat screens, automobiles and cell phones, furniture, beds, electricity and water, public education and access to federal and state welfare.
How then, do we explain – how then can we explain – food lines that stretch hundreds of yards with the urban poor waiting for food handouts to supplement their meager incomes and the need for added food in their apartments and homes?
Not just here in Everett but all over the nation!
Passing out free food to the needy is noble.
The churches and citizens groups doing this in Everett throughout the virus crisis are to be commended.
However, the embarrassment of living in a nation we call the greatest in the world in the 20th year of the 21st Century where many of its citizens need to wait in line for free food so their families can eat – well, we might ask ourselves: “What the hell is this all about?”
Are we a third world nation?
Are we as wonderful a place as we like to believe? Should we be ashamed of ourselves?
Who has caused such a situation with hunger and the need for free food to come about?
All of us.
This is the answer.
All the big thinking, big speaking liberal Democrats and all the big thinking, big speaking conservative Republicans have brought us to a place where Church Street all the way to Broadway and beyond is awash in a sea of humanity awaiting free food from week to week during this crisis.
We live in a nation where farmers have to destroy crops rather than to deliver them because of overproduction.
We watch long lines of Americans arriving in their automobiles at some free food distribution spots and just shake our heads.
Those waiting in long lines for food under the hot summer sun cause us to shake our heads again and again.
How can people need food in our society?
This is not rural India or China or third world nations in Africa.
This is Everett in America, with thousands lining up from week to week for free food to feed their families.
This should be shocking to all of us who do not need to line up for free food.
Such a scene so often replicated across the nation proves our government is out of step with the poor, and that not enough has been done to aid the poor and those unable to eat unless they are handed free food.
If there weren’t so many who have the need for free food, it wouldn’t matter.
We look foolish and a bit like skin flints in a nation where so many have to line up for free food.
Thank God there are corporations willing to donate free food for the needy.
Our government is out to lunch and has been for a long, long time.
There should be no people in our society who suffer a lack of food.