Instead of studying for finals (because, really, who cares how DNA is transcribed?), I've been reading (shocker, I know). I just finished The Devil's Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea. It's a beautiful narrative following a group of Mexicans who attempted to cross into the US through the Arizona desert. The route they chose is notoriously deadly, and of the original group of twenty-six men who set out for El Norte, fourteen of them were flown home in bodybags. This is not an anomaly. This happens all the time. As you sit here, reading this, there are men and women walking through the desert who are dying of heat and thirst and exhaustion. They will likely rot in the desert alone. Their bodies will not be identified. Their family will not be notified. They will disappear.
There's a very good reason why this happens. It's not because the desert is hot. It's not because there are people who want to come to the United States, whatever the cost. It's because of criminally insane border policies and politics. It's because of US immigration policy and trade liberalization and global economic factors that are driving Mexican families further into poverty. It's not about individual choices, any more than climate change is caused by us all not driving Priuses.
The other book I've been reading is called Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement by Janet Poppendieck. Her thesis is essentially that food banks and soup kitchens are doing more harm than good in the effort to combat hunger. That might sound weird, so bear with me for a minute.
Hunger is a very visceral issue. We identify with it easily, and it's one of the most noncontroversial charitable activities in the world. Most major religions have specific provisions in their holy texts about feeding the hungry. For those of us who are food secure, the idea that people in the United States of America don't know where their next meal is coming from is deeply disturbing and makes us feel awful and a bit guilty. We debate the merits of giving spare change to homeless guys, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who seriously believes it's wrong to provide someone who's hungry with a meal.
So we have all this guilt and frustration. And we channel it into organizing food drives and volunteering at food banks. Let me be clear: these things are not bad. They're not wrong. But they are a band-aid. They're not solving a problem. And the people who do this work for a living know this. Food bank directors are painfully aware that they're not fixing anything. These things are called "emergency food" for a reason. They're supposed to be an exception. But they've become the rule. And, Poppendieck argues, by directing so much energy at this band-aid strategy, we've stopped trying to solve the problem of hunger. We, as Americans, don't demand increases in food stamp benefits. We don't have meaningful public discourse about defining the federal poverty line in more realistic terms. We drop a can of food in a bin at the store and feel a little better.
Why are people hungry in the United States? More to the point, why do we frame this as an issue of hunger? We've somehow managed to frame the issue of poverty almost entirely in terms of hunger. Poppendieck speaks at length about other factors causing poverty. Real wages have declined precipitously since the 1970s. Housing costs have gone up, to the point where they're routinely 50% or more of a low-income family's budget. People are not poor because they make bad choices. People are not food insecure or hungry because they buy cigarettes.
Reading these books concurrently has put me in an uncomfortable place with regards to activism. I'm a micro girl. I want to help people. I want to go work for No More Deaths and put jugs of water out in the desert so people won't die. I want to hand out food at the FamilyWorks Food Bank in Seattle, where I've volunteered for much of my life. I want to see people smile. I want to talk to them. I want to make everything better.
This is work that needs to be done, to be sure. But it's not going to solve the underlying problems. Giving delirious desert walkers water is not going to stem the tide of immigrants who are literally willing to go through hell to get to this country. Handing out cans of beans to people who need them won't raise the minimum wage or change the fact that one-eighth of Americans are currently on food stamps.
I don't think macro policy work is necessarily the answer either. To be sure, I would rather live in a country where we feel strongly enough about human rights that we give anyone who is unable to feed their family money to do so. I would rather live in a country with closed borders that has a reasonable number of visas and a humane policy for dealing with people who are living here illegally. But more than that, I want to live in a world without poverty and inequality. I want to live in a world where you can make enough working as a cashier at Safeway that you don't need food stamps to buy a bagel and banana on your lunch break. I want to live in a world where our border is open to anyone who wants to come across it, and more than that, I want to live in a world where we don't have thousands of people willing to risk death to come here because they can find meaningful, well-paying work at home. I want to live in a world where we don't need food stamps as much as we don't need food banks. And that world is never going to come about through government reform.
I'm not going to end with an answer or a compromise. I know I need to read more, and think more. I know you can do macro and micro. I know there are options and people who've thought about this before.
But I would like to ask you to spend just a few seconds of your life right now thinking about some of these people. Think about the people who, right now, are walking across the Arizona desert in search of a better life, the people who are half-crazy with heat and dehydration and have nothing to keep them going except hope and prayer. Think about the people who work one or two jobs and have food stamps and still can't afford to feed their families, the people who skip meals and pretend they're not hungry so their kids won't go to school with empty stomachs. These people are not literary devices or abstractions. They exist right now, in this country. If that's something that you believe should change, think about something you want to do. Something you would do if you had time. Anything. Anything at all. And even if you can't do it right now, keep it with you. Pass it on.
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