Thanks for that, made my day.

Bob.

Recently our church moved to a new location and found an elementary school nearby with many kids in the same situation - no food from Friday to Monday. This is 25 miles from the US Capitol building. There are many invisible poor in our midst...

admirable - but really, shouldn't our governments be doing more to help their citizens rather than subsidizing ________ (fill in blank with appropriate entry, eg, futile wars, fossil fuel industries, expensive 'consultants', dictators (though only apparently right-wing ones), israeli occupation, arms industries, etc., etc.,)

i know it's the season to be merry, etc., but it's hard to hear the cries of the disadvantaged over the noise of the cash registers....

Leslie, maybe you missed my dig on Black Friday and white collar greed last year at this time:

i would have bought the light on the left - nice shape!

oh, and DON'T get me started about white collar greed / crime / indifference.

as the old saying goes, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in....

We have an almost identical situation in the tiny rural town where I live. The teachers reported it, and we respond with donations. No problem... without such fanfare as pictured above, I must add.
However, it is real easy to get food in the U.S. Food stamps. This suggests to me that parents are, er, inattentive. My daughter who is 41 and lives elsewhere, tells me that it is common for parents of her generation and younger to be self-absorbed and pretty much ignore their children.

Heartwarming and sad..Wow a big wake up 2.5 million homeless and 13 million unemployed

The politicians have kicked religion out of the bed and are getting it on with the bankers this casual relationship is spawning homeless, poverty entrapped children feeding them “keeping up with the kardashians” to blind them and to ease their suffering.

From the time laps I would have had a slow to freeze frame when those stats screened then you would be able to focus on the actual people in the clip apply that info to those people then back to time laps
We live in a global atmosphere of me first and only, you have to put up a hard fight not to become a glazed zombie from every gulp of air.

Rant will never be over.

Sad... but great job you guys do there!!

/Ulf

The problem with the current obsession with materialism is it affects the haves as much as the have nots. If you haven't got a 100" HDTV and a BMW then you're a failure and depression and nihilism sets in.
One of the (probably only) redeeming aspects of the caste system in India is you can be a millionaire and still you're less than a nobody or you can be so poor you cannot be sure of a good place to sleep on the pavement and people will still bow down to touch your feet.
Now that I think about that, one of the most humbling experiences of my life was having two children in India bow down on their knees in front of me to touch my feet. Gobsmacked doesn't describe how I felt. The other experiece from the same country came from a quadraplegic who survived in a pedestrian underpass in Connaught Place, Delhii. That man moved around like a worm and yet when he looked into my eyes I felt the dignity he had burn a hole in me.
There is still plenty of good in this world as Musicvid has shown, you just have to look for it. Getting depressed by the evil around us will not defeat it.

Bob.

In the state of Virginia, food stamps are not available to illegal aliens, nor to legal aliens who have been residents less than five years. It may also be difficult to get food stamps if you have no fixed address. I suspect that in many cases, those in need do not qualify or are afraid to apply to non-govenrnment groups that do not check immigration status. Food stamp requirements vary by state.

There are some things that government does well, but when a private group steps up to address an unfilled need, the first reaction of government seems to be to shut them down. Several years ago, a group of local churches got together to address the problem of hypothermia deaths among the homeless population by giving them food and shelter each night. This worked well for three years until the county decided they would have one location staffed by a "real" volunteer agency. "Fiasco" was the term most used to describe that effort.

The county decided to give the program back to the churches, but then declared that no food prepared in the homes of the members could be used to feed the homeless!!! Home kitchens "did not meet food safety standards"!! A well placed story in the local news backed the bureaucrats down.

So, the county has decided to leave us alone. There has been one hypothermia death in the 5+ years of the program. The fire marshall's office still fusses at us a bit, but that's OK as they are often right. The local police cooperate with us very well as they know they have an alternative to filled shelters and that we will take people at 3AM and give them a hot meal and a warm place to sleep.

The moral here is that individuals can make a difference when a need is identified. It does not take a big formal program to improve the lives of the less fortunate.

Rant over...

A discussion worth having.
Truth is, many families will not even apply for food stamps or energy assistance because they are fearful that their children will be taken from them and they will be deported. In most states, even a minor prior conviction in one's home country will trigger that process.

Even when inner city schoolkids are not immigrants the going is tough. I taught a middle-schooler who broke down cardboard boxes after school until dark to buy food for his grandmother. He lived with her, but did not do his homework, because the electricity had been off for two years. Another of our seventh graders was shot to death on the steps of the same middle school by a gang bullet intended for his cousin. An angry eighth grader set 13 arson fires in that same 100 y/o building, and the worst one burned a computer lab to the ground. The police and the district knew him, but did nothing for fear of gang retaliation and escalation. This all happened in the space of one school year, my first year working in a public school.

The knuckleheads who complain they can't get by on $400,000 a year are corrupted by self-delusion.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039754/Tea-Party-Congressman-John-Fleming-says-barely-gets-600k-year.html

"i would have bought the light on the left - nice shape!"

Leslie, OT but if you are interested in the older oil lamps, email my username at gmail.
I have a good sized collection, with several on cl this time of year.