Thanks to rising unemployment and food prices, the Washington Post tells us, Americans on food stamps are set to pass 30 million this month for the first time ever, passing the historic high set in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Not exactly something for those folks to celebrate.

The food stamp data will highlight the theme of hunger as Congress deliberates soon on an economic stimulus package, which hopefully will include a boost in food stamp benefits. President-elect Obama promised during the campaign to stop childhood hunger, particularly since his mother briefly received food stamps one time, and both were the benefactors. Let’s hope he follows through.

The president of the Food and Research Action Center in D.C., an anti-hunger policy organization, said that “we soon will have the most food stamps recipients in the history of country. . . . If the economic forecasts come true, we’re likely to see the most hunger that we’ve seen since the 1981 recession and maybe since the 1960s, when these programs were established.”

These are painful facts to read. Yet, reading this article, what came to my mind was Norman Rockwell. Yes, the man who illustrated America’s magazine covers, whether for Saturday Evening Post or Look.

I thought of Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings: Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Fear, and Freedom of Religion. Ironically, they were done for posters in 1943, at the height of WW II, to encourage Americans to buy War Bonds to fight the Axis. Yet the bonds we need to sell today are to fight wars on poverty and despair, corruption and greed, rather than the manufactured War on Terror, which includes the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As you can or will see, the Four Freedoms pieces are somber paintings for Rockwell, perhaps his best. They’re not filled with the apple-cheeked Stockbridge. Massachusetts’ children, always with big smiles on their faces, freckles, and a well-fed healthy look about them. The two youngsters in the Freedom from Fear painting are asleep as their two slender parents, one like the artist himself, look over the kids, as if to protect their dreams.

For Rockwell, illustration met a powerful historic reality and became art. The historic reality, too, of this article is that government data show that 11.9 million went hungry in the US at some point last year, including the man on the corner of Broadway and 106th Street whom I hear asking at the top of his scratchy lungs each day “will somebody help me get a hot meal?”

He always says “a hot meal,” not a sandwich, not a cup of coffee, a drink, a piece of pie, but something any mother would say to her child, “sit down and have a hot meal. You need to eat something nourishing.” Sometimes I give him my spare change, sometimes a dollar. I always look in his eyes and see want, even anger. I understand that hurt and how it could strike anyone.

I understand, too, that nearly 700,000 children went hungry last year, a sad rise of more than 50 percent from the year before, even before this recent economic tsunami hit. If the man in the picture ,Freedom to Speak, in an old leather jacket and chinos like my own, has stood up to say what’s true but everybody’s shocked to hear, it’s that this hunger of 30 million people is a sad commentary on the world’s number one consumer of everything, that is, those who can afford to consume so much, while others consume so little.

The Washing Post notes, “Food pantries and other charitable organizations are also reporting an increase in demand from those in need . . . Visits to local pantries are up by 20 to 100 percent over the past six months, and calls to the Capital Area Food Bank’s hunger hotline have jumped 248 percent. Most are from people who have never used food stamps or a pantry before, said Lynn Brantley, the organization’s president and chief executive.”

This is in the capital of supposedly the world’s most affluent nation, though the banking community and the Wall Street casino players have made a sick joke out of that title. The contraction of credit from highly speculative betting losses and borrowing has caused a severe contraction in corporate capital, causing massive losses of jobs. Unemployment hit 6.5 percent in October and is headed to 8 percent by 2009’s end, just as rising food costs remain high. October’s consumer price index for food and beverages jumped 6.1 percent from last year. Even staples like eggs and bread rose faster. As the poet Shelly said, “If winter is here can spring be far behind.” I certainly hope so, at least for a spring of prosperity.

For low-income families who spend a higher percentage of their budget on food, those statistics hurt. Even though food stamps are adjusted for inflation once a year, by September the maximum benefit fell $64 a month short of the price of “the thriftiest, USDA-established diet for a family of four.” October’s annual adjustment of 8.5 percent for the most part brought benefits in line with food costs again, yet the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan policy group tells us that if “current inflation persists, by December benefits will again fail to match the cost of the thrifty food plan.”

Is that what the War Bonds and human sacrifice for World War II and all the other incredible wars bought us, then as now? How ironic, that just when more people need the food stamp program, it’s considerably less able to meet their basic food needs. What happened to the Freedom from Want? Rockwell, who expressed such a deep love for everyday Americans, must be turning over in his grave. He died on November 8, 1978, this time of year, back when we were struggling with runaway inflation.

What would he think, this six-foot-one guy, who couldn’t make the Navy in WW I the first time he tried to enlist because he was eight pounds under weight? He went out that night gorging on bananas, liquids and donuts, and made the weight to enlist the next day. They gave him the job of military artist in his tour of duty. Look at the painting, Freedom from Want, you see an aging mother, her husband behind her, as she lowers a large lovely turkey to the table, and the grown-up children look happier than kids. You understand this is more than a poster and not just about food, but life itself savored in this celebration.

Returning to the Simplified Nutrition Assistance Program (the euphemistic new title for the food stamp program), you need an income below 130 percent of the federal poverty level, less than $27,564 for a family of four. Average benefits are $109.93 a month per person, the government’s notion for that low-cost, nutritionally adequate diet. I’d love to put Bush and Cheney on it, El Rotundo, and the rest of the congressional high rollers. I’d love to introduce them to my friend on Broadway and 106th Street and all the other street corners.

The SNA Program has also made fighting hunger strangely contemporary. Participants get an electronic card used like an ATM card to buy food at most grocery stores and some farmers markets. Maximum benefit for a household of four, $588 a month. Many garage spaces in New York City cost more than that, just to set things in perspective.

Nevertheless, the Washington benefits office was busy yesterday, Post writer Jane Black tells us. It’s part of the Department of Human Services on H Street NE. She describes the people who are coming for benefits, some for the first time, others returnees. All the stories are hurtful to read about. Yet the bottom line is that applications are up in the Washington area by about 7.5 percent over last year. Also, in Arlington County, Virginia, food stamp applications are up 17 percent in the past six months over last year at the same time. So things are looking down all over town.

This temporary bump in food stamp benefits is to carry recipients through to the next stimulus package, that is if the banks, brokerages, and myriad other bailout seekers, haven’t eaten all the cash that’s left in the Treasury. I think of skinny Norman Rockwell, smoking his pipe, thinking at the easel, trying to figure it all out on canvas. What has happened here, a moral and ethical recession as well as a financial disaster?

Of course, the economists rationalize food stamp benefits as a kind of jump-start to the economy, pouring relief on people who are likely to spend the money quickly (no kidding), feeding an economy equally desperate for demand. Moody’s rationalizes the food stamp giving as every $1 spent on stamps generates $1.73 of “economic activity” (whatever that is), more than “extending unemployment benefits or offering state fiscal relief.” That sounds like baloney to me, more like the Band-Aid of last resort, a start for those at wits’ end.

Stacy Dean, director of food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, appropriately commented that “Congress has been focusing on the impact on the financial markets. We want them to focus on the supermarkets and help 30 million people.” Amen.

Additionally, in 2009, the new Congress has to deal with the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act’s renewal before it expires next September. It includes school breakfast and lunch programs, the Women, Infants and Children program, which pays for foods such as milk and infant formula. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chair of the Agriculture Committee, fortunately is “keen on” expanding eligibility and toughening mandates for nutritious food in these government-funded programs.

He sounds like the kind of guy Rockwell would paint, say with a bunch of laughing kids of all colors around him. He’d have a blue suit on, white shirt, red tie, and Rockwell would exaggerate his build upwards, like the doctors in his paintings, stolid, serious, but not too far from their oaths to serve the cause of good health that starts with good nutrition, keystone of all.

Lastly, look at Rockwell’s Freedom to Worship painting. He endows the faces with a genuine empathy and peace. They are not angry, accusatory faces. They are not “me versus them” faces. They are almost beatific. And Norman, if I may call him by his first name as a Stockbridge neighbor, has scrolled above them the line, “Each according to the needs of his own conscience,” which implies a respect for diversity and restraint from dogma. The faces are painted like a closely gathered bouquet of flowers, each lovely, worshipful, and complimenting each other.

Whether you are religious or not, this is a vision worth considering on Thanksgiving, and every day. Really, the greatest thanks we can give is for each other, around a table, in a foxhole, a shelter, a farmhouse, an apartment, a home for the aged, a prison dining room, anywhere where people will gather to enjoy a good meal and their own deific humanity. Bless them all, whoever is listening.

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