Thanksgiving

“Our nation’s greatest strength is the decency and compassion of our people. As we count our many blessings, I encourage all Americans to show their thanks by giving back.” These are the words of our Fearless Leader - remarks made after a photo op at a DC food bank and that most important presidential tradition, the pardoning of the turkeys.

America has never been wealthier. In fact the number of people earning in excess of a million dollars annually has more than doubled in the last decade. And yet this week some 35.5 million Americans lined up at soup kitchens and food stamps offices to feed their families for the Thanksgiving holiday. As we sit down to our turkey dinners with all the trimmings, hundreds of food banks and pantries that put food on the table of the nation’s poor are staggering under the weight of increased need and sharply reduced donations. Part of the reason food banks are running low on supplies is the absence of direct government spending; we just hate spending taxpayers’ money on slackers when it could be better spent, you know, overseas.

Mike Curtain, executive director of DC Central Kitchen which provides hot meals for thousands, had this to say about the need and low donations. “I don’t think as a nation we are who we think we are. When I see the money wasted overseas in Iraq and knowing what it could do here, it makes me sick...People in the world hate us, and rightly so, because of the way we treat our own people,” he says. “Poverty would soon disappear if we invested some of that money on a living wage, healthcare and education. ”

Gee, Mike, that seems so un-American of you.

Thanks to Leonard Doyle of the Independent for this insight... read his whole article here.