Michelle Obama to fight hunger

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is cooking up a nonprofit campaign to provide 1 million meals to hungry families.

The campaign coincides with Obama’s new food-focused, puppet-powered kids’ TV show, “Waffles + Mochi,” on Netflix.

The initiative, called “Pass the Love w/ Waffles + Mochi,” will target the scourge of food insecurity that has worsened during the pandemic.

Boxes will start being shipped out in May and will contain enough ingredients for three meals, according to campaign organizers.

“Pass the Love w/ Waffles + Mochi” is a collaborative campaign by the nonprofit Partnership for a Healthier America and Higher Ground Productions, the Obamas’ production company.

Florida and California. Opposite coasts, opposite political leadership, opposite approaches to fighting COVID. The Sunshine State has a Republican governor named Ron DeSantis. The Golden State has a Democrat in charge, Gavin Newsom. DeSantis wanted fewer COVID restrictions on businesses and activity and Newsom favored more. Each state ultimately has suffered a massive death toll from the virus. In Florida, more than 32,000 are dead. In California, more than 56,000 have perished.

DeSantis, a White House hopeful, is using the fact this his state and California experienced similar death rates to claim that lockdowns don’t work. Lockdowns, DeSantis said recently, have resulted in “the destruction of millions of lives across America, as well as increased deaths from suicide, substance abuse and despair, without any corresponding benefit in COVID mortality.” Actually, 32,000 fatalities show that the Florida style free-for-all is what didn’t work.

The truth is that lockdowns and mask mandates do work, provided the population cooperate. They stop the virus from spreading and reproducing. But lockdowns and masks only succeed when people follow the rules, because, absent Big Brother surveillance, there isn’t a way to strictly enforce mask rules and social distancing restrictions for hundreds of millions of Americans.

What California and other states that did lock down have seen is that people are human beings, who struggle to stay away from others. When restrictions go on interminably and aren’t accompanied by incentives to encourage people to follow them, people grow fatigued and stop obeying the rules.

Neither Florida nor California should have experienced so many deaths. By the time Florida experienced its first major spike in cases in June, the state had had ample time to learn how to avoid having any large outbreak at all.

Florida failed to learn from New York, which was hit first by the virus, but where, with mask mandates, restrictions on activity, and a gradual reopening accompanied by widespread testing, new case numbers plummeted by Memorial Day and remained extremely low until late fall. Our suffering and rebound should have been the smart model to follow.

The Left Coast kept cases low for a long time too, with restrictions on businesses and gatherings during last spring, summer and fall. But cases began to soar in November. A new lockdown was ordered, and many were too exhausted and too broke to comply.

California’s lockdown rules, which initially closed playgrounds but allowed movie production to continue, didn’t always make sense or seem fair. And by December 2020, $1,200 aid checks authorized by Congress nine months earlier had long since been spent, leaving poorer workers in particular gambling with their lives just to earn some dollars.

New York and Washington State, where the virus arrived early, before we knew how to fight it, couldn’t have averted the early deaths. But in the rest of the country, far too many people died who shouldn’t have. These United States were never united when it came to fighting COVID. It was our collective failure to coordinate, and not lockdowns, which caused so much needless suffering.

Dayton, Ohio: Voicer Felicia Nimue Ackerman believes that trying to prevent suicide in the young and healthy, but assisting it in the terminally ill is “a double standard that is blatantly discriminatory.” Ackerman is wrong. Suicide in the young and healthy kills the possibility that things will get better. Suicide in the terminally ill just ends costs and suffering.

Vic Presutti

John Esposito