As we sleep on

Bob Herbert's column in Monday's New York Times reminds us of the forgotten issue in the presidential campaign: hunger. Hunger and its companions: poverty and desperation. He says

a report from the Department of Agriculture [shows] that more than 12 million American families continue to struggle, and not always successfully, to feed themselves.

The 12 million families represent 11.2 percent of all U.S. households. "At some time during the year," the report said, "these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food for all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources."

Of the 12 million families that worried about putting food on the table, 3.9 million had members who actually went hungry at some point last year. "The other two-thirds ... obtained enough food to avoid hunger using a variety of coping strategies," the report said, "such as eating less varied diets, participating in federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries or emergency kitchens."

And whose fault was the fact that this never came up during the campaign? Who let it be ignored, forgotten? The GOPpers? Oh, please - like they were ever going to bring it up. The media? No, not this time, this one isn't their fault. So who does that leave? Who ignored it, never brought it up, never appealed to the "moral value" of fighting hunger? Who dropped all mention of the "two Americas?" Who could have brought it up and failed? Any ideas?

A new study by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group, found that more than 550,000 families in New York - a quarter of all working families in the state - had incomes that were too low to cover their basic needs. ...

According to the study: "Most low-income working families do not conform to the popular stereotype of the working poor as young, single, fast-food workers: 88 percent of low-income working families include a parent between 25 and 54 years old. Married couples head 53 percent of these families nationwide. Important jobs such as health aide, janitor and child care worker pay a poverty wage."

(I remember saying several years ago in a mailing list debate with a libertarian, "I'm also aware of the people around me that I see each day at my job who are working just as hard if not harder than I am, longer hours at more physically demanding jobs, but are worse off than I am because we as a society devalue their work.)

Herbert concluded by saying

[t]hese are rough times for the American dream. But times change, and the people who have broken faith with the dream won't be in power forever.

As the man says, it's a matter of surviving a dark time.

Footnote: A summary of the Center for an Urban Future report is here; the entire report, in .pdf format, is here. The USDA data is through its Economic Research Service; you can find it here. It wasn't easy to find; I had to go about four or five levels deep. It's not like they wanted to make it big news or anything, is it? I wonder why?