Two Connected Articles

BackBurner Soup,
originally uploaded by nodigio.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4BF02420081216?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

I never did understand this. It’s perhaps the stupidest thing Bush did as President. In a war situation, the individual is frugal while the country spends heavily. Resources are funneled into the war effort, not taken from it for private use. This is a fundamental economic fact. This is what I did, and what I encouraged my family and friends to do. This is why we, as individuals, are doing comfortably in a recession/depression economy. It’s also why our country is in a serious economic mess – with both the government and individuals spending money that didn’t exist recklessly, we all knew the day of reckoning was coming.

The more aware among us prepared for this as best we could – water and food stockpiled, debts reduced as low as possible, our homes taken as off-grid as we could manage, food gardens put in, spending taken down, alternate transportation methods found, barterable skills enhanced, savings increased, and frugality our biggest watchword.

We all could see that the day those credit cards and loan debts would be due. If so many of us could see this – years ago – why couldn’t our government? Why didn’t our elected employees listen to us? We sent letters. We made phone calls. We met with our elected employees to express our concerns. They didn’t listen. They not only kept spending, they urged us to spend, too, contrary to common wisdom. Our highest elected employee told us spending was our patriotic duty.

And enough people believed him that they exactly that. They spent themselves into homelessness and crushing debt.

I believe that every single person who became homeless for the first time in the last 5 years should sue the US Government and the office of President of the United States of America and soon-to-be-former President Bush personally for their state of affairs – not to recoup their losses but to drive home the point to each and every American, politician or not, that spending money is not and will never be the way to get out of debt or to improve the economy. At the end, they will still be poor because they also bear a portion of the responsibility for their poverty because they made bad choices. However, they only bear a small portion of the blame since they trusted professional economists and trained government officials to tell them the truth, and they trusted our President to urge us to do the right thing instead of something so dreadfully disastrous.

Bush, because of the authority we vested in him upon his inauguration, bears the brunt of the blame personally and professionally. Who, in their right mind, believes that going deeper into debt is the way to get out of debt? Bush was wrong to promote greater indebtedness as the patriotic way to get out of debt. Those who listened to him did so with the best will and desire to do something, and if he’d advised them well, we’d still be in a financial m3ess, but it wouldn’t be the devastating one we face for so many people now. Had Bush advised us as other war-time presidents had: to save money, be frugal, spend less, grow victory gardens, curtail our travel, we’d all be better off. But he didn’t and many of us followed his advice, trusting him to know better than they did.
I didn’t listen because I’m a stubborn old woman and I’ve lived through enough economic downturns to know better. I trusted myself and my experiences, and so I find I am doing better than many of my neighbors and co-workers who are earning substantially more than me.

And that brings me to the second article:

“While the family shelter waiting list is longest for families in San Francisco, single men, particularly returning veterans, continue to be most likely to end up on the street.

They are forming the new group that Cooper sees during his food rounds. Recently he reached down to a man on the sidewalk and asked him if he wanted something to eat. The man asked if he had to pay for the food. Told that it was free, he admitted that he hadn't eaten in three days. Then he began to weep.

"You see people now and you wonder where they came from, how they got here," Cooper said. "People say to me this work must be gratifying. But I never go home gratified. I go home feeling guilty."”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/16/BA5N14OGCD.DTL

I know how Cpt. Cooper feels. When I started Sandwich Saturdays 9 years ago, I was feeding only 7 people. Now, I feed over 100 and wish I could feed more. I know that realistically, I have reached the limit of what one person can do in this. I can only make about 100 sandwiches and deliver them on a Saturday morning. It’s not gratifying to feed these people. It’s – sad and depressing.

These people are clueless, especially the newly homeless. They’ve never been homeless before, never imagined what it would be like to be homeless, never thought they’d be the ones living on the streets or out of their cars. They have no idea what they can do, and most social services won’t help them because many are still working and still earning too much money to receive any kind of aid at all. They’re paying off crushing debt, can’t file for bankruptcy, can’t reorganize their debts the way a business can, and they’re homeless, hungry, desperate people.

They don’t know how to cobble a shelter out of cardboard boxes, or how to find the (comparatively) warmest corner. If they don’t have an understanding boss, in a few weeks, they’ll be jobless, too, the ones who already aren’t, and they still won’t qualify for assistance because aid will be based on their last 3 months’ income – completely ignoring the fact that they are homeless. It doesn’t matter what they earned 3 months ago or last week, right now, they have no home, no food, and maybe no job. You can starve to death in 3 months. You can freeze to death in minutes as cold as it’s been yesterday and today.

I know, when I bring out my sandwiches next Saturday, there will be missing faces, not because they moved on or find a place to live, but because they died last night, or maybe they’ll die tonight.

And there’s precious little I can do about it.

Gratification is the last thing I feel when I pass out my sandwiches. Despair and desperation come closer. And many of them are so happy to get a free, no-strings-attached sandwich, a list of places that might help them a bit more, and maybe a coupon for a free haircut or a free order of fries.

That’s all I can give them, a few of them, come Saturday morning. A sandwich is a poor substitute for a safe home and a warm bed. Some days I question whether I’m doing any good at all, if I should even bother. And I think – that’s a hundred sandwiches less hunger.

10 one and a half pound loaves of bread make 100 sandwiches – bought at the day-old bakery, it costs $10.00 for the bread. A 2 pound jar of peanut butter is 30 servings; the store brand costs $3.00, so $10.00 worth of peanut butter will make 100 sandwiches, so for $20.00, you can make 100 peanut butter sandwiches. That’s 20¢ a sandwich.

If everyone who had a spare $20.00 could make up and give away 100 sandwiches; that would help a lot. It’s not much, but for each person who could do this, that’s 100 sandwiches less hunger. If each person who made up 100 sandwiches could convince 3 other people to also make 100 sandwiches, and if they could convince 3 more people to make 100 sandwiches, and those people could convince three more and so on, think how many sandwiches less hunger we could all create. There could be people making and giving away sandwiches every day of the week – no-strings-attached sandwiches to hungry people. We’d have sandwiches in our backpacks and briefcases that we could hand out whenever we saw a hungry person.

One meaty chicken carcass can make 32 servings of stock. 3 meaty chicken carcasses or one meaty turkey carcass, 3 pounds of carrots, 3 bunches of celery, 3 large onions, 1 bulb of garlic, and 10 pounds of potatoes or 5 pounds of rice and you have enough good soup for 100 people, for about 25¢a serving. Of course, the bowls to serve the soup in cost a bit more than that, but you could probably buy in bulk from a restaurant supply store or buy last sales promotion leftover bowls from a restaurant fairly cheaply, a nickel a bowl or thereabouts.

If you can afford more, for less than 50¢ a sandwich, you could make cheese and bologna sandwiches with fresh lettuce and mayonnaise or mustard.

I’m not going to get into the whole “deserve it” argument. No one deserves to be hungry. I don’t care if they’re mentally ill, drug addicts, financially careless people, or what. A 20¢ sandwich or a 30¢ bowl of soup isn’t going to fix their homelessness, but it will feed them one meal. And that’s all I’m trying to do. Keep them fed so they can live to get the help they need or to fix what made them homeless.

I don’t feel gratified to feed them, or charitable, I feel like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike – I can plug one hole, and I have to trust others will plug the other holes and cracks until a better fix comes along.

And it really pisses me off when people we should be able to trust, whose advice should be sound screw us over the way Bush’s “buy more stuff” advice did. It’s not sound, it’s not patriotic, and it made matters far worse than they should have been. And these bail-outs? They aren’t even as effective as a finger-in-the-dike. They are just opening the floodgates behind the dike and playing more pressure to the straining dike. Those of us standing on the dry side trying to hold the floodwaters back are being pressured even worse by these poorly thought out bail-outs.

I’m glad the auto bail-out hasn’t passed yet – it needs a lot more careful thought as to how the auto companies could be helped – and that help should not come from tax dollars. The taxpayers will help, because we’re nice that way, but our tax dollars should never go to bolster a faltering private industry, whether it’s the mom and pop convenience store, a behemoth manufacturer, or a religious group. If a major manufacturer fails, we’ll deal with the fall-out, the same way we dealt with the end of the gold-rush, or coal mining. People will survive as long as we make sandwiches and help as we can.

So, gratified - no.Despairing, optimistic, depressed, hopeful – yes. Make me feel better. Go make a sandwich and give it to someone hungry.