Blue Collar, Bare Cupboards

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032608C.shtml

Blue Collar, Bare Cupboards
By Sasha Abramsky
In These Times

Wednesday 26 March 2008

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Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

At the Catholic Community Services center in the working-class town of Springfield, a 15 minute drive from Eugene, you can see a line snaking outside the one-time church on any given Monday, Wednesday or Friday morning.

Young and old, male and female, they wait patiently for the doors to open and for staff members to place their names into a database. Then they enter the food pantry and fill their boxes with whatever food has been donated that week.

"On a slow day, we'll serve 80-to-100 people," says Joe Softich, 61, the church's food program manager. "Toward the end of the month, I expect to do at least 140 families, maybe 180."

Softich is a skinny, gray-haired man, his somewhat gaunt face covered by a thick beard. He grew up in a grocery store in the copper-company town of Anaconda, Mont., studied microbiology, Russian and religion in college in the '60s, and decided long ago that feeding the hungry was his calling in life.

He shows me freezers full of meat and vegetables, boxes of beans and fruit, peanut butter and cartons of milk. "We see so much need. You hear these stories day after day. You need something to sustain you beyond feeling good about what you do. It's a delicate thing, to be able to help in a way that isn't demeaning."

Softich estimates that 13,330 Springfield residents received food from Catholic Community Services last year.

"We ran out of food three days ago," says Angela Oliver, 38, a one-time drug addict who got clean and recently moved back from Washington State to Oregon to live with her sister and her sister's four children. "We have a few things in the freezer meat-wise, but I'm pretty much a vegetarian," she says. "We have no milk for the little ones, no vegetables, no bread."

Three of the four children get free lunches from school, Oliver says, and the fourth, the youngest, lives with her grandmother. "The kids don't go hungry. They eat before I do, there wasn't seconds. There was just enough for everyone." She adds: "If there was no food bank, I honestly don't know what I would do. We couldn't even scrounge dimes up right now."

To be poor in America has never been easy. But to be poor in Bush's America is devastating. The federal government has turned its back on-and has made it clear it doesn't take responsibility for-those who are unable to make it on their own.