History will not be so kind as to support the justifications we have given ourselves for the growing epidemic of hunger this week. As SNAP benefits expire, despite ample emergency funding in Washington, our nation has reached a critical milestone that will define its soul in the years to come: either we resolve to tackle childhood hunger, or we rekindle old welfare tropes that vindicate our callousness towards it.
This month, nearly 2,200 families in Muhlenberg County will struggle to afford food without their SNAP benefits. In Daviess County, this figure jumps to 5,439 families, according to the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Across Kentucky, an estimated 230,000 children rely on SNAP to eat regularly, though about 55% of their parents are employed, according to the USDA.
The margin between survival and starvation for many of our working neighbors on SNAP is the $347 per household they receive each month. Without this tenuous lifeline, many of our friends in the pews next to us will not be praying for world peace this Sunday, but instead that five loaves and two fish will once again feed the multitudes, including their kids.
Childhood hunger has been directly linked in numerous studies to lower test scores, higher absenteeism, lower educational attainment, and higher behavioral issues. For children under two, nutritional deficiencies, particularly iron, negatively impacts “their cognitive, socio-emotional, motor, and physiological health, even changing the actual structure of their brain,” as reported in a 2012 study published by the National Institute of Health.
However, in some conservative circles on social media the focus is not on eradicating hunger but rather punishing the mythical “welfare queen” and presumably their children as well. Their message is clear: stick to the Spam and leave the cake to us; those who dare use SNAP should remain both eternally deprived and eternally grateful, lest they no longer deserve its mercy.
This fervor over SNAP persists in part due to the American tradition of “dignity policing,” as social media personality Dr. Shawna, a Kentucky educator, recently explained on her Tiktok account. The anger around food stamps isn’t about protecting tax dollars, but rather policing who’s allowed to feel normal, she said, “because we’ve decided poor people only deserve to survive, not to thrive.”
We blame the poor for buying normal foods like chips instead of dried beans because “there’s a specific performance people want of poverty,” she said, such as being humble, quiet, grateful, and visibly deprived. But given the average SNAP benefit in the nation is $6 per day, “there’s no luxury here. Just survival, with small moments of normalcy,” she added.
To put this in perspective, the Act of 1789 granted members of the House of Representatives a per diem of $6. More than 200 years later, those on SNAP are still expected to feed their families with 18th Century wages.
Let us be clear:
- Members of Congress, who now make $174,000 annually, are no more deserving of food than hard-working single parents fighting against the stalemate of $7.25 an hour in an economic deadzone with skyrocketing health care costs.
- Members of Congress, who haven’t worked in weeks, are certainly no more deserving of their recent paychecks than the nation’s unpaid women and men in uniform, who are now a growing contingency at their local food banks due to the government shutdown.
While Congress fiddles, hunger burns in the bellies of our nation’s military families and retirees alike. Impromptu food banks in front yards and church basements have sprouted up in the audacity of hope, but it will take a sustained, bipartisan neighborhood commitment to continue these stopgaps.
Though Gov. Andy Beshear has ordered the release of $5 million of Kentucky’s reserve funds to support food banks, this bandaid cannot replace a national, deeply-held commitment to eradicating hunger in our neighborhoods.
This lack of unification has allowed the president to use the nation’s food insecurity to take us to heel. It is political retribution and distraction from his political graft and the files that shall not be named. It creates an unnecessary crisis in which he vilifies his political enemies by weaponizing the suffering of the nation’s starving.
To this we must agree: physical suffering must not be allowed to empower political leaders.
As Patrick Henry espoused, “We have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, … In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. If we wish to be free — if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending — we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight!”
Just like Henry’s compatriots, we have been put in an untenable situation, one that demands we cast off the divides of political parties and focus instead on our humanity. Hunger makes equals of us all, and in that, let us find the resolve to advocate for our neighbors in need, rather than becoming the wedge that Washington wants and social media craves.
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