I was out last Thursday running my payday errands. Doing the things to keep the world spinning. Groceries, gas and guzzling down a soft drink to reward myself for standing strong in a dizzy world. A spinning world is good. That is, when lengths of wool are spun unto a spool. When the spider spins the web, a home is made. The sales office spins out new products and services. The sun was even spinning on this out of season cool August day. The breeze was more like fall than late August. The cool breeze inspired a flash from the past fall. A fall of loss, a fall of humility, and for me, a literal fall. A time in my life where I went from helping those in need to needing help. Now pumping gas I thought about my own time in need.
Reality has a bite to it, much like the breeze but more like when you are nipped by a puppy that doesn’t know its wrong yet. The little drops of blood are a saltiness to the one biting and the pain is yours to bear. Reality is the biggest dog in the campus of life.
The temperature has a way of transporting us sometimes. Its like being hit with a snow ball and remembering your first snow ball fight. We travel in and out of our memories and in these memories are chances for perspective. Chances to see the struggles of others. A pit developed within my stomach that worked up and choked me as I breathed in. Pushing away the anger, pushing away the fear was not enough. I had to see, I had to feel what was in front of me. More than just a reminder of seasons and my own suffering. But the reality of a line.
What line? Not a line like the ones as you wait for the tickets to your favorite band to go on sale. Not like the line at the new food truck off of 117th street. Nor like the lines at the Dominos around the corner or the one I had to wait in to pay for gas. This is a line for a chance at a warm meal. The line outside of the food pantry was longer than I had ever seen. Longer than the nightclubs of Miami. Even longer than waiting to take a leak at a Red Sox game.
The food pantries are a life blood for anybody that is down on their luck in life. Food pantries feed those in need with the least amount of questions. The demand is only predicted to rise with estimates reaching up to 70 percent increase in local food pantry use in the coming months. Currently the food pantry is stretched thin on volunteers and the ability to put together enough meals to feed the community in need. This speaks not to a fault of the pantry but to a reflection of the need in our communities. Risk factors to food insecurity spreading as prices go up and once stable, professional jobs, are cut. More and more are facing the new millennium bread lines than ever before. Thats not a sensationalist claim, that’s not a reason to pout, it’s just reality.
Take my home state, New Hampshire. We have an average rental unit at $1,400, and one the highest cost real-estate markets in the country. All the while we still have a $7.25 an hour minimum wage. With rental prices going up and the staples of life going up, the community is in stress more than ever. Families are having to find the places to make up for the unplanned raises in the cost of living. All without a raise in the quality of living.
We are moving towards a bottom that is ready to fall out. We have for too long left the burden of compassion to fall on the few that include others in their hearts. The rest has been left to fall into the traps of the war on poverty has set for us. The martars and RPG’s of misconceptions and blame. Those don’t work when we are speaking about children standing in line with their parents. You can’t tell a child to work harder. And punishing a child because of a parents actions isn’t going to inspire the parent either. It’s beating an already beat dog.
Our excuses, scapegoats and misconceptions of human motivation have led to burnout and hunger in our own back yards. We talk about “ Making America Great” or “ hope” and “ change” but leave out the compassionate bond that makes community possible. The act of compassions and empowerment has been politicized instead of normalized. We use songs like “YMCA” to hype up political rallies but don’t even understand what that song was about. The YMCA was a place that person who had no where else could go could get help, community and empowerment. Now the YMCa’s of various communities struggle to offer programing that empowers health.
This isn’t a call for anger. This isn’t a call for blame or even responsibility. This is a call for compassion. We have for too long looked to our left for an answer of blame and condemnation. We have looked to our right for a savior to come down from the sky to save us from ourselves. We often look back and find ways to comfort ourselves after our long days surviving and trying to pull together peace. But do we ever look forward? Do we look forward not by saying “we must walk in their shoe” but by simply asking together. By seeing that something are not “handouts”. Food is not a hand out. Thats like saying access to air is a hand out. Food is a hand up. Food isn’t an act of charity, it is an act of investing in the future. I used to be the guy that said the can drives didn’t matter. But that was until I needed the can drives for my own table.
When we say we have to walk in their shoes that is separating ourselves from the problem. It is saying that is it “their” problem and not “our”. When one child is hungry we are all hungry. It shouldn’t take us losing our homes to see this. It shouldn’t take a sermon. When I stood in line, when that was all I could do, I didn’t want people to walk in my shoes. I didn’t need another to struggle with me. I didn’t need another person to operate themselves from my need. I needed the same as my own clients I once served in Case management. I needed action. One person, one day, one can of food at a time.
Feel guilty or hopeless of where to start? Use that as a sense of awareness, a sense of care is a sense of being alive, and use it to act. Action is the only way we feel better when we know something is going on that is wrong. We cannot turn our backs to the suffering of another. We can start with t a can of soup or raviolis from a discount store instead of a candy bar. It’s that simple. Many have goals of getting in shape and eating healthy but still overspend on food not needed. Welcome the food pantry into your shopping list. If 1000 people each donated one can of food a week that is 1000 children that can eat. We cant keep scratching our heads and saying we don’t know what to do. This is much like getting lost on a hike and screaming “ohh shit we are going to die” and running off into the woods. We worry that what we do won’t be enough so we just go with what our emotions and scapegoats say to do. Those that die in survival situations don’t die of hypothermia, they die of despair and shame. Our communities cannot die in despair and shame. Do you think a bee wonders if their work matters to the hive? Do you think a farmer ignores that one weed or bug or says “its just one rabbit or one seed”. Do you think the violinist in the Boston Pops says their note doesn’t matter? We say every vote matters, well every can of food not donated matters. So please donate what you would eat. The people that make our world stressful don’t take days off so let the games begin.
Dylin Bates 
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