Fear grows with lack of stimulus funding

Everett Grace Food Pantry volunteer distributes food. The pantry has provided over 1 million pounds of food since the pandemic started. (Photo by Jim Mahoney)

US Senate oblivious to people’s needs

By JOSH RESNEK

The working people from this city we speak with every day are worried that without a new stimulus, and soon, jobs are going to permanently disappear, economic instability will intensify, and the nation’s recovery from the pandemic will be seriously threatened.

Everett has been hard hit by the pandemic and the subsequent closing down of the local economy.

It has been weeks since the partial reopening of the local economy. Many businesses have yet to get back to where they were before the pandemic hit in March. Government aid for smaller businesses is at an end right now.

The city government has laid off employees. In at least one instance, the city government has reneged on a promise to hire new employees, leaving those that expected to be hired in a lurch.

Some businesses have closed.

Many thousands of Everett residents have been out of work for months.

“Another stimulus would provide me and my family with an unemployment extension, the $1,200 stimulus grants and with free food, we can get by. Without government aid, surviving is made near to impossible,” said Santiago Vega, a cleaner for a local janitorial service. Vega worked in skyscrapers cleaning offices for 8 years before the pandemic hit.

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How do we explain food lines?

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?

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