Polarized America

[Undertoad]

Fine, amended, Kit: in the US there is hunger, but not one single sign of starvation. Not one.

In NPR's worst efforts they found poor people who "made tough choices" but not one starvation amongst the lot of them.

They found 38 million people who are "food insecure" because as you said, they live paycheck to paycheck and one paycheck may not get the food on the table. And here's a picture of one of them, from "A Rural Struggle to Keep the Family Fed":



Or from "Hunger Hidden but Real in America's Suburbs":



I've seen pictures of real hunger and it sure doesn't look like this.

[Kitsune]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I've seen pictures of real hunger and it sure doesn't look like this.

Yeah, I was tickled by those images, myself. I don't doubt that we are better off, today, but I do think there is a widening gap and on the bad end are usually single women/mothers trying to scrape enough money together to try to get a deposit in on a low-income apartment and out of the weekly stay places downtown. They work jobs at/slightly above minimum wage with no benefits, hardly a "living wage".

The gap, today, is an interesting one in that people aren't out deficient in the same ways they were decades ago. Standards of living are up in some aspects, but down in others. Cheap, fattening food might be easier to come by, but healthcare is largely absent from low wage workers.

I've pointed it out, before, but this book was an interesting experiment in living in those conditions. It can be done, but getting out of that condition seems extremely difficult except for a lucky few. The conditions these people live in are certainly better than the poor of 1930, but their lives are hardly full of luxury coffee and air conditioned bliss. They're unhealthy and fairly miserable.