Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1413-1415

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannize over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Oscar Wilde

 The most recent data from 2012 estimates that four million Canadians are "food insecure." More concretely, this means that, 310,000 adults had times when they were hungry, but could not afford to eat. Out of these, 200,000 actually lost weight because they could not afford to buy food. Approximately 190,000 households were also unable to feed their children a balanced meal because they did not have enough money.

And while the average Canadian spends only 10 per cent of their income on food, low income households may spend as much as 75 per cent. So, naturally, when food prices go up, those least able to deal with the financial shock are often the hardest hit.

In response, some well-meaning activists urge us to carry on the "giving spirit of the holidays" into the new year by donating to food banks and other social service agencies...

However, this sort of philanthropy is dangerous. As Alberta Views magazine argued so well, private support to such charities allows the government to avoid fulfilling its responsibilities of providing basic services...

Just as we would not accept that someone's ability to visit the doctor when ill or the right of a child to attend school should be left to other people's generosity, the better-off should not be determining if and what the poorest eat.

Which begs the question: why are our taxes not being used to ensure that sufficient, nutritious food is accessible to all Canadians?

Need for national food policy intensifies as costs soar and food insecurity remains
By Raksha Vasudevan
rabble.ca
February 2, 2016
[emphasis JS]

 Nearly 220,000 Ohio children under six are poor and young children of color are more likely to be poor. More than half (55.5 percent) of Black children, 40.3 percent of Hispanic, and 19.1 percent of White children under six in Ohio are poor; 21 percent of them live in families where at least one parent works full-time year-round; 47 percent have at least one parent working part of the year or part-time; and 32 percent have no employed parent. Nearly one in four Ohio children lacks consistent access to adequate food—that’s 653,410 Ohio children of all ages in every corner of the state. Nationally, 15.3 million children were food insecure in 2014. The majority live in families with one or more working adults—but are still unable to consistently afford enough food to keep the wolves of hunger from their door.

There is no excuse for any child in America to go hungry and malnourished in the richest nation on Earth.

..

Mrs. Coretta Scott King once said, “I must remind you that starving a child is violence.”

Hungry Children in Rich America
by
Marian Wright Edelman
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Huffington Post
[emphasis JS]