Whatever It Takes: Time for an All-out National Assault on Hunger
The video gone viral of New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-lago with Donald
Trump, Donald Trump Jr.,
Eric Trump and assorted Trumpettes dancing while a lounge lizard sang “Play That Funky Music (White Boy)” seemed certain to take first prize as the perfect coda of the Trump years. It was merely cringeworthy, however, and was quickly overtaken by a felonious phone call Donald Trump reportedly made to Georgia’s secretary of state to demand that he “find” the votes necessary to enable Trump to claim he won an election he certifiably lost. Trump’s call was just the latest sampling of the cornucopia of criminality that has characterized his presidency from start to finish.
But in the stiff competition for the most emblematic illustration of our current national embarrassment, honorable mention must surely go to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-texas, who, in the middle of a pandemic in which millions of Americans lack sufficient food to eat, tweeted out a picture of a “great tenderloin dinner” from a fancy steakhouse. “Highly recommend,” Cornyn tweeted in a triumph of empathy for the more than 5 million of his fellow Texans who are without access to basic sustenance. Cornyn’s homage to fancy steak meals came the same day that Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell blocked the Senate from voting to provide $2,000 in stopgap checks for Americans, over 50 million of whom have gone hungry this year. Seventeen million of those hungry Americans are children. The funds aimed at helping 1 in 6 Americans
eat are, according to Mcconnell, simply “socialism for rich people.”
President-elect Joe Biden has the unenviable task of clearing out one truly filthy Augean stable, a disastrous state of affairs brought to us largely by a calamity of a president. Biden cannot be expected to clean every corner of a stable most foul immediately, or simultaneously. But the time is past ripe for an all-out national assault on hunger in America, a point driven home recently by U.S. Rep. Jim Mcgovern, D-mass., who urged the president-elect to appoint a national hunger czar to lead a coordinated effort to eradicate hunger in America. “Appointing a high-level official in your Administration to oversee and coordinate a national anti-hunger strategy,” wrote Mcgovern, co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, “would be a turning point in the fight against hunger and signal your administration’s firm commitment to an issue that millions of American families deal with every single day.”
Mcgovern exhorted the incoming administration to take a number of specific steps to rescind measures taken by Team Trump to curtail eligibility for food assistance, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. “With an unprecedented fifteen percent of Americans ... struggling with food insecurity,” said Mcgovern, “there has never been a more pressing time to strengthen the country’s social safety nets.”
One hopeful aspect of the four-year debacle of a presidency we have endured is that it has forced many of us to focus on the need to reset, to quit relying on time-honored but fanciful self-flattery. Whether regarding the depth of racial injustice in the United States, the calcified, unequal economic opportunity or the rotted fidelity to democratic norms among our countrymen, it has been made crystal clear, if painfully, that we are not the country we professed to be or thought we were. The good news: We have a historic chance to take bold steps to better synchronize America’s self-image with reality.
This is true with the not-so-secret secret that the world’s richest nation is home to tens of millions of hungry people. “It is really a scandal,” Mcgovern says. “These are our fellow citizens who don’t even know where their next meal is going to come from. It’s unbelievable.”
It doesn’t get any more basic than ensuring that our fellow Americans have enough to eat — this week, next week and always. Mcgovern and those who advocate for seizing the opportunity to eliminate hunger are right to believe that this is a whatever-it-takes moment.