poverty – Hank Kalet

On food drives and poverty

Matthew Yglesias at Slate makes a compelling argument against the traditional food drive — but it’s one that, in the end, I can’t support. The argument — that donated money makes more sense — has some validity in larger communities, but in areas with smaller food banks, money can create a strain.

Organizations like Rise in Hightstown and the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton rely on both food and money, with money going a lot farther toward meeting the needs of local communities because they can buy in bulk. But smaller organizations like the South Brunswick Food Pantry (which also has a trust fund that collects monetary donations for other services) and Skeet’s Pantry in Cranbury do not have the manpower or economies of scale to be able to take advantage of bulk buying power.

The greater issue is our societal reliance on food banks and soup kitchens to plug holes in the safety net. Poverty is a social issue and is created by larger cultural trends with impacts that reach out beyond the immediate families into local neighborhoods and beyond into the larger community.

Relying on private organizations to address larger societal problems is destined to leave us chasing our tales on the poverty issue, always a step behind, the solution just a step out of reach.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Hungry for real change

The numbers are horrific — highest poverty rates in years — and the efforts on the table are just not good enough.

New Jersey, for instance, is looking to institute mobile farmers’ markets, which as I said yesterday, can be useful but really are nothing more than a Band-Aid.

Even the very good proposals offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel today on The Nation Web site — including an increase in food stamp allocations — will do nothing to address the larger causes of poverty.

To really make a dent in this problem, we need to do more. We need to upend our economic system and rebuild it. We need to realize that corporations are not the best of most efficient providers of services, that they exist only to build profit and nothing else — and they do that by charging as much as they can get away with while doing everything they can to keep costs down.

Enough is enough. Our well-being is more important than the corporate order.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Taking to the road to help the hungry

Mobile food markets are a good idea, but flawed in the proposed form. Relying on the nonprofit sector once again to provide for the poor leaves the plan — and the poor who we are supposed to be helping — at the whim of donors. Hunger is society’s problem and efforts to address it should be paid for by the society as a whole, which means it should be a government program.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Tax cuts for the rich or food for the poor

Washington debates tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year, while far too many struggle at the other end of the economic spectrum. Can you say skewed priorities?

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Let them eat … somewhere else

Stories like this leave me shaking my head:

A judge has ruled that a church in Phoenix, where homelessness is on the rise, cannot feed the homeless. Crossroads United Methodist Church lost a court battle that began after neighbors complained about its weekly pancake breakfast and the hungry riff-raff turning up for it. Zoning, says the court.

The pastor, on the church’s blog, sums up the contradictions and biases implicit in the ruling, ones that only increase the dangerous economic divide in our society, a chasm that threatens to rip us apart.

However, there’s still a lot of questions to be answered. Questions like, How hungry? What about our potlucks? What about our Christmas dinner or Easter Sunrise breakfast? When I eat that, I am pretty hungry…is that allowed? What about the coffee and donuts we serve on Sunday mornings? Can we eat that if we are hungry? And then there is the other question, “How poor?” How poor do we have to be to be considered a “charity?” Federal-poverty-guidelines-poor? Not-able-to-make-the-house-payment-poor? Or, how about not-able-to-pay-off-the-credit-card-poor?

Or, are we just discriminating against people who are poor and who don’t have homes, because we don’t like what we feel when we see them? The real issue, is not that there are hungry people out there, or that we serve food in church, the real issue is that we are afraid. Afraid to reach out a helping hand; afraid to see what the economy could do to us; afraid to face our worst fears…

We can minister to the poor…that’s a given. We can hold a worship service for them out on the front lawn. We just can’t feed them. We can’t fill their bellies with warm food. …We might as well just go to the street corners and start handing out money, in hopes they will make their way to some food, because you are not allowed to do it at church!

And since, when we give food to the hungry and poor, that somehow redefines us as a “charity dining hall”…who among us can eat at church? Can we put a donut or a sip of coffee in our mouths when we can’t do the same for the poor? In good conscience, can we eat anything on church property if we can only give food to the well-off and wealthy?

The decision was rendered in Arizona, but it seems consistent with the kinds of battles we see over zoning everyday — battles of affordable housing rules, for instance. As the pastor says, our opposition to many of these things stems from our discomfort with what they say about our society and our fear of the other, especially of those who are poor or darker skinned.