She  found, at first, only part-time work, as Assistant Activities Director at the Philadelphia-Germantown YMCA, an age-old, respected community institution in a highly diverse neighborhood. In her years there she more than tripled activities group membership, began and oversaw dozens of classes, including a variety of low-cost and terrific art offerings. Eventually, while she continued on with her art and mounted shows and sold to an increasing number of private collectors, she began to find full-time posts in social work. She is the very best I've known and she's won, here in Maryland, state-wide, formal recognition for her excellence.

     I'm put in mind of Tamar's use of post-college graduation food stamps not only because the latest winnowed set of candidates have wound up nasty, racially-tinged rhetoric about those whom Jeremiah and Jesus demanded we care for let alone not demonize, but because Costco is now starting its third year accepting food stamps at all of its well over 400 superstores.

     Here's the reason:  The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly half...

                          half our nation's children

will receive food stamps at some point during childhood, this according to a study in The American Journal of Pediatrics.

     Costco knows it's good business.

     Lest you think this is largely about welfare, know--

         . that fewer than 12% (let alone half) of our children are in welfare-receiving families or in families that ever received welfare or in families that will likely ever receive welfare.

And yet,

         . 50% of American children will, at some point, receive food stamps.

     This means that--

        . there are numbers of food stamp-qualifiers that reach well beyond welfare eligibility, and

        . as to geography, race, and ethnicity, among food stamp recipients there just is no real gulf between urban/rural, black/brown/white, on and on.

     We may, one day, have the guts to fight poverty consistently, work, and work, and work, and win.

     Among the ideas that, first, simply must die for all children to have a shot, is

        . the false and small-minded and largely racist assumption that there's anything close to a one-to-one ratio between food stamp and welfare recipients.

A second (and quite insane) idea that must die is the one that suggests that

        . poverty is impenetrable and intractable because recipients are content.

And a third idea that we must accept in order to succeed at any form of anti-poverty work is that

        . it's possible, despite demagogues, recession, despite bigotry.

     While you're considering that, look up the racial, ethnic, and geographic welfare and food stamp distributions rates over the past forty years. You may find the unexpected, perhaps not for you, but for someone you know. Among what you'll find is this:  fully sixty-percent of current food stamp recipients are white.

                           If there is one truth about us it's this:

                             nothing gets done when we wait

                                 for the 'right conditions'. 

     There is no such thing as life getting better when we say we must wait to Do Good until we Feel Better.

     The truth is that we Feel Better when we Do Good. 

     The truth is that the ambivalence and outsized self-righteous anger among some progressives in the face of the current imperfect president is little more than a myopic invitation to those who have already told us they'd harm our children with glib indifference.

And the children of poverty? They're  our children, all of them.

Reject the lies you're hearing now. Do not wait.

Support local efforts to feed children.

Vote to stop those who world destroy the New Deal and its legacies and return us to a pre-FDR, wholly corporate-driven world in which we're back-patted for our very worst rabidly solipsistic, anti-communitarian instincts. 

Join me. Please act. I believe you will.

Feeding America: Community Center    food bank locator