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From: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Extent of hunger in America
Message-ID: <765@psivax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Sep-85 12:51:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: psivax.765
Posted: Mon Sep 30 12:51:22 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Oct-85 03:17:00 EDT
References: <200@gargoyle.UUCP>
Reply-To: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
Lines: 66
Summary: 

In article <200@gargoyle.UUCP> carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) writes:
>Rick McGeer writes:
>
>I'm not sure what Rick means about people going hungry "because they
>simply don't eat well, even though they have the means to do so."  I
>don't think there are many people, besides ascetics, who knowingly
>choose to be chronically hungry.  If people don't eat well because
>they are ignorant or don't know how to budget, that is clearly a part
>of the problem.  Some poor people buy name brands instead of generic
>foods because they can't read the English labels and have seen the
>name brands advertised on TV.  
>
	Well, I might not have worded it exactly like Rick, but it is
my experience that many of the hungry are that way because of some
form of mental illness or neurosis. There are those who have money but
believe themselves to be poor and there are even more who for one
reason or another are unable to function in a job for any length of
time even where they have the necessary skills (a friend of mine hired
someone who habitually failed to show up for work and never called in
to say he wouldn't be coming in - needless to say my friend fired him)
In short, in America most of the hungry are socially dysfunctional in
some way, in countries like Ethiopia most of the hungry are relatively
ordinary people who would have no trouble supporting themselves in a
dynamic economy.

>Here are one or two anecdotes that appeared in the Tribune series
>(article by Christopher Drew):
>________________
>
>In many ways, Katherine, a 28-year-old black woman living on
>[Chicago's] South Side, is a typical welfare mother.  She grew up in
>a public housing project and now depends solely on public aid to
>support herself and her 8-year-old daughter.  
>
>Never married, she tried to break out of this cycle of dependency by
>working when she was in her early 20s.  But she gave up hope for
>employment after her other child, a baby boy, crawled into a
>refrigerator and suffocated while in the care of a sitter.
>
	This is in fact just the sort of thing I am talking about. A
young woman unable to hold a job because of an obsessive, irrational
fear. Her daughter is really not allthat much(if at all) safer with
her home, and there is no reason to believe she would have been any
more successful in preventing her son's death than the babysitter.
Such accidents happen *occassionally*, but they do not normally
prevent the survuvors from functioning normally. And the risk remains
quite small(I and my siblings spent many hours with a babysitter with
no untoward events at all). Perhaps what should be done instead of
providing free food is to provide free psychiatric counseling so that
she can get over her fear and return to the job market. In cases like
this food only treats the symptom not the real problem. To solve this
sort of thing *something* must be done to eliminate the *cause* of the
unemployment(irrational fear, inability to maintain responsibility,
delusions &c.) As a matter of fact this is one of the most difficult
things to handle, since we are talking about human minds rather than
simply physical things like fodd supply and distribution. I really do
not know what can be done about it and I would be willing to listen to
any likely idea. In the meantime, though, it looks like the best we
can do is continue to feed these people through charity(goverment and
private) and hope for something better to come along.
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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