On Thanksgiving, remember those less fortunate

November 23, 2005|Marian Blanchard

Americans have once again begun their annual Thanksgiving pilgrimages, racing across the country to be with their families and loved ones this holiday week. They'll enjoy bountiful food and spend long afternoons watching parades and football games or taking long, turkey-induced naps. It will be a leisurely time for most of us, with few obligations or responsibilities.

Try to create a mental picture of the first Thanksgiving - one that many of us saw in our childhood school books - an idealized table of fresh-scrubbed pilgrims being served a bountiful meal by happy American Indians.

While we don't know if this picture is accurate history, or simply legend, the important lesson it teaches should not be lost - the Pilgrims were being fed this first Thanksgiving meal because they were hungry. The American Indians felt a moral obligation to provide sustenance to their new neighbors.

We hope that Americans today will share this sense of commitment to their neighbors and community, and will take action to help those who will not find themselves sitting at nicely set tables with steaming platters of food this holiday season - the millions of Americans who struggle every day of the year to make ends meet - working families who must often choose between paying their bills or providing food for their families.

Many are honest, hard-working people who struggle for many reasons - perhaps they earn low wages, or illness or injury have left them with high medical bills, or unable to work. And there are others, too, who through circumstance, addiction or even poor choices, find themselves facing hunger.

Today nearly 39 million Americans are food insecure - hungry or at risk of hunger - including almost 14 million children. Food stamps often provide an important safety net for these families. Unfortunately, those who desperately need this nutrition program may soon find that the safety net has been pulled away, and that they are in a free-fall to hunger and despair.

Congress is considering cutting the food stamp program by more than $840 million. If this spending cut is approved, the results will be calamitous. Thousands more Americans will be forced to go without food, maybe once in a while, maybe every day but they will go hungry, and they, and us, as a nation, will suffer.

Poet Carl Sandburg wrote, "We are the greatest nation and the greatest people. Nothing like us ever was." But we will not be the greatest nation if we knowingly and intentionally cause our neighbors and others less fortunate to face the agony of hunger, and the shame of not being able to feed their own children. The "greatest people" should not stand for this.

We urge everyone to take a few minutes this long and quiet weekend to gather your families once more around the dining room table to write letters to your Congressmen. Urge them to not cut the Food Stamp program. Deliberately taking food away from those most in need would be nothing short of disgraceful. It certainly would not be American. It would, in fact, make a mockery of the lesson we were all taught about the first Thanksgiving. It is a lesson our nation must not forget.

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