New Orleans I caught up with the Sunday New York Times late in the day. I flipped through the opinion section quickly, same ol’, same ‘ol, it seemed, smoke signals from distant mountains, largely unseen. I got to the end and noticed a piece by Tracy Kidder, “America is Rewriting the Social Contract.” I’ve read a bunch of Kidder’s books about building a house, computers, doctors in Haiti and Peru, a homeless advocate in Boston, and more, so it caught my eye.
Reading the first couple of paragraphs, I looked back at the place identifier: Easthampton, Massachusetts. I picked up the phone and called my old buddy from high school, who one of my oldest colleagues from ACORN used to call “my only old friend,” who is a retired professor from Springfield College who lives in Easthampton. “Had he seen the piece, or did he need me to send it to him?”
I knew Easthampton. I had stayed with him and his wife, as I always do, when in western Massachusetts, when the ACORN Organizing School did a training there two years ago at the amazing Audubon Center. We had unsuccessfully joined with people in Easthampton to apply for a low-power radio station. When I used to run every day, I had jogged through the downtown repeatedly, climbed the hill behind their house, and more. If this is part of ground zero of the building crisis of hunger triggered by the passage of Trump and the Republican Congress’ budget bill, it’s worse than any might imagine.
Kidder repeats the statistics that we have seen reportedly on the blood exchange of tax breaks for the rich and less food and healthcare for lower income families, but the real story here was the juxtaposition of this desperate and struggling food bank in Easthampton behind the curtains of a thriving, comfortable old mill town hardly miles from some of the fanciest colleges in the country. The Easthampton Community Center and Food Pantry runs the food bank with one 71-year-old full-time employee, who can’t retire, because the need has skyrocketed from 1000 during the pandemic per month to 5000 now. At the center, at homeless camps, and elsewhere, she and her volunteers distribute 2.5 million pounds of food monthly.
There are 50 million people across the country who depend on similar food operations. As Kidder reports, 85% of the Easthampton food bank participants depend on food stamps. The national average per recipient is only $187 per month, hardly a king’s ransom. I’m no George H. Bush, who doesn’t know what the inside of a grocery store looks like. I eat frozen dinners, but the two of us almost drop that every week, and we don’t really cook, and our kids are grown. Meanwhile, Kidder shares that almost 50 million people in 2023 reported they suffered from hunger at some point doing the year. “Almost seven million households experienced what’s referred to as very low food security, meaning they sometimes had to go without a meal, or even a day’s worth of meals, and often don’t know where their next meal is coming from.”
Kidder tried to be fair to the other side of the food stamp argument, even though you know he doesn’t believe it, and that it is in fact incredible. He mourns the destruction of the safety net, even as my hair lights on fire. He ends his piece, perhaps a bit moralistic for some Times’ readers, but powerful in its own way:
The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson [from Louisiana], who rallied votes for the bill, once said: ‘Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’ Perhaps he should reread the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. There Jesus warns his disciples of what he will teil the world’s ungenerous people on Judgment Day: ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ The damned ask, when had they failed to do all that for him? Jesus replies, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to the least of these, you did not do it to me.”
Putting your hand on the Bible, as many of the evangelistic conservatives do is not the same of course as living by it. As we all know, actions speak louder than words, and no number of words are going to disguise the hunger and everything else in that admonition from the Gospel as they are now being set loose and growing all around us, even in Easthampton.