Reply #36: Sadly, you may be right

[theHandpuppet]

What do people do when they become desperate, when they can't put food on the table or pay the rent? They take desperate measures, that's what, and our solution is to incarcerate them much as Scrooge would have suggested as the solution to hunger. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate IN THE WORLD and millons of our fellow citizens go hungry. Yet how is this being addressed by the MSM? How many discussions concern this national crisis right here at home? Of course George Bush doesn't discuss poverty anymore -- even mentioning it might get folks to actually thinking about it and how his so-called moral leadership has utterly failed us. Better to talk about bringing democracy to Iraq or fearing the next attack from the "axis of evil" et al ad infinitum. Smoke and mirrors. Bloody and costly distractions to keep our outrage aimed at targets outside our own borders while our country rots from within.

Until a couple of years ago there was a little girl on our block who would go house to house asking for food. Sometimes she'd just walk in folks' houses and head straight for the kitchen and rummage through their cabinets. I'd always try to give her something or bake cookies for her, make hot dogs, anything to fill her stomach, but then some neighbors advised us that as a gay couple we ought to be careful letting a little 3 or 4 year old girl into our home. It was sickening.

The family since moved to a housing project and I do know that at least once her parents "lost" her, only to find her in the home of someone else in the complex who offered her some pizza. I still worry about her -- she was a tiny kid and trusting of strangers and would do anything for food. I can hardly stand to think about it. And there are plenty of kids around here just as hungry.