Sick

My mother liked to tell a funny story about being out on her own during the Great Depression. It involved a teenaged girl nobody wanted much -- Mom -- hunger, and fear. Mom thought it was a hoot. I suppose that I don't have her perspective.

Mom was the youngest of six children; her father died when she was five. In that time and place welfare did not really exist, nor did aid for widows -- especially if they were immigrants. So Grandma remarried ASAP. To another immigrant, a bootlegger who didn't expect to raise someone else's children for very long. So she pushed her kids out of the house as fast as she could. She got them places on farms, with dairymen, even forced the oldest daughter into early music with a bona fide abuser -- who she later divorced. (When I was young, I was warned that Auntie Ex was a little peculiar. It took them decades to tell me why.)

As the youngest by far, Mom got to stay around the longest. But in eighth grade she was told to quit school and make her own way in the world. I believe that Grandma gave her the advice "Don't have children," on her way out the door or not long after. You could call Grandma a lot of things -- people did -- but "sentimental" was not one of them.

So Mom found work as a mother's helper -- a live-in housekeeper -- before she was 15. She worked for a lawyer's family: room, board, and $10 a month or so for full-time work. Fortunately, the lawyer's family treated her well enough.

And that was the problem. Mom ate with the family every night. She ate what they ate, in precisely the same portions. But they didn't eat much, and Mom did -- she did all the heavy work around the house, and she was a teenager besides. "They'd serve one piece of bread with the meal," she'd moan, rolling her eyes. "One piece!"

Soon she was going to bed hungry every night -- and waking up hungrier. But she was too afraid to ask for more food. Who knew what might happen? In 1935, in a small city in farm country, in the Great Depression.

So Mom suffered for a while until she just couldn't take it anymore and raided the refrigerator in the middle of the night. She found something that looked like a cake of deviled ham sitting on a plate on a low shelf. She guessed that no one would miss it, and she gobbled it down. "It tasted so goo-oood," she told me later.

The next morning, the lady of the house asked the world at large -- in honest puzzlement -- where the dog's food had gotten off to. (Mom always laughed uproariously at this point in the story.)

Mom broke down and tearfully confessed. Questions were asked, and answered; and the lawyer and his wife, because they were humane people, waved aside the entire matter and began feeding my mother honest-sized meals. End of story.

Last week an acquaintance joked that, if the economy continued on its downward course, she'd be able to get people to clean her house for nothing but meals and a sleeping pallet in the garage. Then she'd feel rich. I didn't find that particularly funny -- nor much of anything else these days. So I told her the story -- not as a joke, the way Mom presented it, but as a story of what it's like to be desperate in desperate times. Mainly, this woman took the point -- she'd just been snarking.

"But," she added, "those people didn't mean to starve her. They just didn't understand."

Completely true. Mom held those people no ill will. Heck, she was even a dutiful daughter to Grandma after she married my dad. She'd give me a smack for telling you this story from the point of view I've used.

My mom needed a place to be in the Great Depression, and the lawyer's family gave it to her. I suppose they felt they were doing her a favor, and they probably were. Of course they could afford to be generous -- they were wealthy by the standards of the day. That little ag town had some very wealthy people in it -- Mom used to say -- and I'm sure the lawyer did well serving them.

And the lawyer's family got something back for their largesse: a clean house at a cheap price. If you costed out Mom's wages and adjusted for inflation, it'd come around to $1.50-$2.00 an hour.

To put it in perspective: if somebody you knew hired a homeless 13-year-old, took her home to clean their house and paid a bed and $2/hour for full-time work: what would you think of that? Especially if they made no time for her to continue going to school, and they thought they were doing her a favor? Mom never did go back to school; she never got her high school diploma; and she never got a good job in her life.

Yes, it's all in the perspective; Mom had hers, I have mine.

Now, the only reason I've been thinking about this is that I've been sick lately. Twice. This has not been a good few weeks. Sure, I took some time off, but somehow staying home sick is almost worse than going to work. Staying home was fun back in elementary school when you weren't really that sick, but your mother would take no chances and it was all about a long day of your favorite toys and books, unlimited television, and Campbell's Cream of Tomato soup. The vapor off a hot bowl ot Campbell's C of T would instantly eat through the dried snot in any blocked sinus or plugged nostril. You didn't even have to actually consume the stuff -- just sniff.

But when you're older and stay home sick, there's nobody to fetch the Campbell's -- because we're all two-earner households these day. And all the chores you know you have to do just stare at you all day. This time I ended up doing the laundry on my sick days from work, even though I really was ill and felt like crap.

So I had descended into a grim mood by Day Two, when the postperson delivered the newsletter from the local food bank.

I give to the food bank because so many poor people around here have a hard time getting enough food all year. These are working poor, most of them. But much of the work around here is seasonal and low-paying. Agriculture. Hotels and amusement parks. Restaurants. Construction (not the good-paying kind). So they need the food bank to fill in the gaps in their income. And this year it's worse than ever.

The back pages of the newsletter bulged with long lists of people and organizations who'd given gifts to the food bank -- thoughtfully sorted by gift amount. People from all walks of life and levels of society. And they're all people who care, and want to help. I have no doubt. I recognized a certain number of names in the back of the book. Some of them are the hidden princes and princesses among us -- not because they give a lot, but because they give all they can.

Then I looked at the front of the book, which listed the food bank board of directors and the advisory council. It was full of pictures of the officers and directors posing at posh fundraisers: laughing, wealthy, and partying for a cause. I know they're wealthy, because I know of many of them. And the others I bloody well looked up on the Internet. Sick people have time on their hands.

There was among them a corporate officer of a giant berry grower. An owner of car washes. The proprietor of the landscaping company that charges my neighbor 'way too much. An executive from the Seaside Company, which operates the Boardwalk amusement park and hotels and restaurants. Another grower. A government rep or two. The widow of a construction industry giant. Yet more growers. And bankers. Lots and lots of bankers to fund the growers and the landscapers and the tourist businesses and the construction companies.

And it occurred to me that all the rest of us who give to the food bank -- all us folk in the back of the newsletter -- are doing a wonderful service to these fine pillars of the community in the front of the newsletter, these businessmen who employ so many. Because these fonts of charity don't pay high enough wages to keep their workers out of poverty, or employ them long enough every year to enable them to feed themselves.

How kind of the rest of us to help out these paragons of free enterprise with our money. Because if their workers didn't get food aid, they couldn't actually afford to stay here on what these fine capitalists pay. With our charity we help the businessmen among us maintain a stable workforce to underpay.

Did I mention that many of the directors and advisors of the food bank -- not all, but many -- are members of the political party that values personal initiative, free enterprise, and low taxes? You can look that up, too. I'm sure they think charity is fine, though; charity is an individual choice, not a government mandate. And it's tax deductible.

I'm sure that many of these people are decent to know face-to-face -- in one case I know that personally. And I'm sure they're happy to throw some spare cash at the food bank and even some spare time at fundraising so that people at the low end of the economic food chain don't starve.

But why should we leave it up to them? Why should the problem of starvation in society be dealt with by society's spare change, given at the discretion of the wealthy. And by the rest of us, unknowingly propping up a bad system for its owners while doing good?

And if I were to wave my magic wand and say, "We're raising taxes on the half-percent of Americans who control close to half its wealth, we're going to make sure that nobody ever goes sick and hungry again" -- what do you think those fine and charitable growers and amusement park owners and construction giants and bankers would do?

Would they be happy and say, "Thank God, at last the poor among us are safe and secure." Or would they fight the proposal tooth and nail with bags of money and threats and dire warnings? Would they say, "No, no, we won't make enough money, our competitiveness will be destroyed, thousands of jobs will be lost, business will disappear, government will waste all the money..."

My answer would be, if your business can't make money unless it pays its employees too little to live and thrive on, you don't have a business. You have a racket. And throwing a few coins that you can easily spare at the people you keep poor doesn't make you any less a source of misery in the world. No matter how hard you exhort the rest of us to feed those poor people. If individual charity alone could solve injustice and inequality, it would have done it by now.

Yes, I'll still give to the food bank, because it helps the starving. But remember -- they're not the only ones being helped.

Live for a world where no one is hungry and no one is sick and no one is afraid. And the wealthy have to throw fundraisers for each other to buy Porsches and third homes and vacations in Tuscany.