February/March Must be Report Season

Hungry Americans...Who Cares?

One report that I forgot to mention was the Second Harvest report on hunger. Now, these Second Harvest do-gooders have a lot of nerve releasing this report. Our concern for Hunger in America went out of style with bell bottoms, disco balls, Richard Nixon, and anti-war rallies. We have big issues like the War on Terrorism to be worried about at this time. We don't need information like 36% of the people served by the Second Harvest Network are under 18 years old. We have to be worried if we are going to get blown up by a falling airliner or an exploding shipping container near our house. We certainly don't have the ability to keep the problem of hunger in our minds when we are facing so many other problems in America. The problem of hunger is too complicated to describe in a 2 minute story, while people getting blown up is an easy story to get the message across in 2 minutes.

We are facing a growing Civil War in Iraq, and the 24 to 27 million different people served by the Second Harvest network are not yet at the point of starting a civil war. So who cares? We have to be afraid of terrorist using telephones or libraries in our neighborhood, we certainly don't have time for worrying about being one of the individuals who will have to utilize the Second Harvest National Network of approximately 44,000 agencies, which are made up of approximately 29,600 food pantries, 5,600 soup kitchens and 4,100 emergency shelters. We shouldn't be concerned that only 12% of the people are in fact homeless using the food progrms or that 36% of the people using the Second Harvest Food Network are employed, when we will probably die because of the effect of global warming.

These Second Harvest radicals are whistling in the wind if they think this rise in requests for food matters to the rest of us when Bill O'Reilly is telling us to be afraid of the liberal media elite. Here in Cleveland, one of the previous poorest cities in America, we could care less that 68% of the people using the Second Harvest Network were living below the federal poverty level in the last month, when the Bird Flu is about to plop down on our heads. So it was a waste of paper to survey the 52,000 recipients to complete this survey unless they had asked a question like, "Are you aware of any secret underground terrorist cells in your neighborhood?" So go read it if you want, but it is boring since no one gets blown up and there is no real enemy for us to hate.

Brian

Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.