They are good kids.
They meet regularly as a youth group and do things together.
Last year, they helped bring a public
smoking ban to their city.
The year before that, they initiated a community-wide trash
pickup. Tons of broken appliances, used auto tires, mattresses and other
casualties of modern life were carted away.
Now they are working on a Get Out
the Vote effort, with an eye toward a constitutional amendment on the
November ballot that could bring
substantial resources for flood control to their neighborhood (which happens to
lie in a flood plain).
The teenagers are serious about their work, but their adult
leader and sponsor decided that they needed to do what most other youth groups
do all of the time—socialize. The leader
scraped together some money and took the kids to the dollar movie.
“I hadn’t realized,” she told me, “That they can’t
afford to even go to the dollar show. It was like they had gone to heaven.”
“So, of course,” she continues, “I knew that I had to take
them to get something to eat. I had a little bit of money left over, so we went
to the Taco Bell. I ordered the tacos, two each for the girls, three for the
guys—we laughed at the guys because they were so hungry. And then there were
five tacos left over. The kids are good, and they are shy, so no one would take
an extra taco. Finally, the shyest kid in the group looks around and says, ‘If
it is ok, I would like to take them home to my sisters.’ “
The leader smiles as she tells me this story. “Imagine that,
a thirteen year old admitting to all of her friends that her family is hungry,
loving her sisters enough to risk being made fun of . . .she is a good kid.”
Five cold tacos. One brave big sister. And hunger.
Quite the different story in Washington, where last week the
House of Representatives passed a bill that would take food stamps
(Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) from nearly 3 million Americans.
Eric Cantor justified the measure as a way to “put people on the path to
self-sufficiency and independence.”
217
members of Congress voted to take food from poor families.
217 cold
hearts. 217 small souls. And 3 million daily moments of hunger.
