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Photos Show the Staggering Food Bank Lines Across America
- ctack 7y agoIt's striking to see people queuing in cars.
- KarlKemp 7y agoCan’t get over the fact that even food banks are apparently drive-through operations in the US, in what appears to be a suburban wasteland... And considering that the increase in demand here is exclusively people who had a job until the bottom fell out on the economy, shouldn’t the whole rationale for requiring people to waste time and go through this exercise of very visible shaming be re-evaluated? As far as I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money. That idea was never a good fit with changing unemployment numbers, and these days it’s plainly visible that all these people didn’t suddenly become drug-addicts incapable of holding down a job. So why continue humiliating them?
- 72deluxe 7y agoI do not know why you've been downvoted but I am not sure that queuing up for something is "visible shaming"? If you need something, surely waiting in a queue for it is a logical thing to do? Its intent isn't to shame you, just you have to wait to get it in a line with all of the many other people who want it. If I had no food, I'd be certain to get in a queue regardless of the "image" it presented. Priorities!
- KarlKemp 7y agoPeople sometimes die because they fail to mention their drug habits to their anesthesiologists. Pregnant Teenage girls commit suicide because they fear anyone finding out, or die giving birth all by themselves, or bleed out with a coat hangar stuck through their uterus. Shame is a powerful emotion. It might be related to me being European that I believe in sparing people such experiences (“dignity” is a big concept here), the stigma itself might be proportionally stronger in the US. Death of a Salesman is all about that, IIRC, and considered a cornerstone of Americana.
- 72deluxe 7y agoI am aware that shame is a powerful emotion, but I am not sure that a drug habit is the same as not having food. Food is something we all need, drugs are not. Food is a mandatory, drugs are optional. If I decide to take up something that is optional, dealing with the repercussions of my choice is part of me choosing to do said action. Food is very different. I remember Death of a Salesman being about how the father carried on away from home and his son found out, and how he killed himself over the shame of it and how it affected his son. I thought it was more about the repercussions of his selfish actions than being purely about the emotions that he himself felt. If anything, the father was not a figure to be emulated. In these sad situations, it is clear that there is a flotilla of other individuals who are also sadly in the same situation, so it isn't a "shame" queue that the "non shamed" observers can stand at a distance and deride. If I was too ashamed/proud to be seen queuing for food (we all do at a checkout in supermarkets anyway?), I would perfectly expect someone to ask me if I considered starving as more important than my presented image. Which would I rather be: embarrassed, or starving?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago>As far as I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money. Do you know that the most educated people in the country are working hard to make poor people buy stuff they don't need? Who is actually running the advertising business and using the best technology ever invented to increase their profit at all cost? Who's to blame? Maybe be should just stop pushing people under stress to do stupid things and provide them with the best resources to fulfill their need. Money is an excellent medium for that when the game isn't just about blind profits.
- KarlKemp 7y agoI was mocking that idea, not supporting it. The problem always was that it’s really hard to give evidence for what’s basically different ideas about human nature. And that the truth is almost certainly some mixture of circumstances and individual shortcomings. But when unemployment suddenly jumps to maybe 20 or 30%, that uncertainty vanishes, and gone with it is any legitimization for purely punitive policies.
- pbourke 7y ago> Can’t get over the fact that even food banks are apparently drive-through operations in the US, in what appears to be a suburban wasteland... I thought the car pickup was happening because buildings have been closed for social distancing?
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMakes a better picture. That many people standing in line wouldn't look like much.
- rasz 7y ago>all these people didn’t suddenly become drug-addicts incapable of holding down a job give it some time
- moltar 7y agoIt’s bizarre to see people in nice, high end cars, to queue up for free food.
- rwmj 7y agoWhy? It's quite likely they don't own the cars outright. People were encouraged to take our car loans and have repayments to make, and the US has constructed its cities in such a way that cars are essential.
- esotericn 7y agoYes, this is bizarre.
- megablast 7y agoBecause it is stupid. If you can't afford it, do not lease or rent it. That way you have less money. And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
- rwmj 7y agoI agree with you, but ... Vast majority of people don't have enough money or free time that they can "restructure" their life around not having a car, which would involve a house move at least. At the same time they are bombarded by advertising for easy car loans, and feel they have to compete against friends and neighbours with possessions which they cannot afford. They take the easy (and apparently state-sanctioned) way out.
- tams 7y ago> And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better. While that's certainly holds true for some metro areas, it's certainly not a rule for sprawling US cities built for cars. Opting out of car ownership limits your employment options, social mobility, and so on.
- pm_me_ur_fullz 7y ago"How dare people have dignity and transportation and communication." Most people do not have the money to purchase a car outright, even the cheap several thousand dollar ones. Therefore they rent or lease, and hope this specific scenario never happens. and get this: they clean them too.
- paganel 7y agoWhy is this not being reported by the NY Times or BBC's International section? And if they are reporting it, why isn't it on their front page?
- kwhitefoot 7y agoCan someone explain this to us on the other side of the Atlantic? I mean, seen from Norway it looks totally insane. How can such a large proportion of people be so financially insecure that a couple of weeks unemployment means that they are going hungry in the wealthiest country in the world?
- fit2rule 7y agoIt happens when the wealthiest country in the world spends more money on war fighting than the other top 10 military spenders in the world - instead of investing in its own infrastructure and social services, it is spending it on demolishing - and then reconstructing - the infrastructure of sovereign states its politically-powerful religious class have deemed enemies of their ideology. It happens, because America has not been about the American people for decades. America is mostly focused on the destruction of sovereign states it finds guilty of being un-American in style. Did everyone just suddenly forget that this is the country that has spent more on destroying sovereign states around the world, in the last 50 years, than any other country in the history of the world?
- akvadrako 7y agoUSA spends 3.1% of GDP on military - which is close to the 2% mandated by NATO. That isn't the reason people can't get food.
- fit2rule 7y agoGDP: Irrelevant, if you are digging your beloved out from the rubble. Good luck with that.
- voisin 7y agoWouldn’t the more appropriate metric be military spending as a percentage of government expenditures? The point being made above is that other governments spend on things useful to the populace and not war. I think by pointing at % of GDP another key point is lost: lower taxes than other countries. The US gov’t takes in less as a % if GDP and what it does take in it disproportionately spends on things that do not benefit the average Joe.
- aaron695 7y ago> Photos Show the Staggering Food Bank Lines Across America Or cars make lines look big. "Minneapolis, Minnesota: Cars line up at a drive-thru food pantry. " Is only 200 cars by my counting. I'm sure there is an untold problem, but I'm not big on trickery.
- jacobush 7y agoSorry, only 200 people in line? That's a staggering number and looks more like something from 1981, Los Angeles in the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness". Not something that should happen in our modern world.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago...out of half a million. During a time of disruption of services. Note: all those people could afford gas. So its not just about poverty. Its about timing, shortages etc. Maybe they were all hoping for toilet paper...
- RickJWagner 7y agoThe calls to open the economy will get louder. We watch the world, seeing what others are doing and what works. Interesting times.
- jacobush 7y agoWhat are you doing with that information?
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago'Staggering' is an exaggeration? In cities of a million, a hundred people is maybe expected? Those pictures might qualify as a 'heatmap', meaning they reflect total population more than anything. And imagine those lines if they were just people. Wouldn't look like much. Further, what were the lines like two months ago? Has it changed much? 1.5X? 2X? Is that the expected fraction of people with fragile economic situations?
- nicwolff 7y agoMeanwhile: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-destroying-food.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-dest... > In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil. which brings to mind John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: > The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.