03/24/2008
from the Kennebec Journal
KENNEBEC COMMUTER: Find another way to get to work
New bishop pays visit, leads service
Where are the voters?
Augusta planners face busy agenda
Former UMA head keeps busy
Green delegates look for exciting convention
Why exactly is Earnhardt Jr. so popular?
HIGH SCHOOL LACROSSE NOTES: Cony takes winning in stride
All of today's:
News | Sports
from the Kennebec Journal
from the Morning Sentinel
ANIMALSAREABANDONED
Bricks from school to be auctioned off to support Run of River
Voters yawn at school budgets
FARMINGTON Estate yields a historical treasure trove
GREENS CONVENTION UPCOMING Two candidates to be at gathering; Maine can send 44 delegates to national convention, second only to California in clout
Retired educator compiling history of Maine teachers, administrators
HIGH SCHOOL LACROSSE NOTES: Messalonskee sees big picture
Why exactly is Earnhardt Jr. so popular?
All of today's:
News | Sports
from the Morning Sentinel
That's the provocative and unsettling idea from the country's leading hunger scholar, J. Larry Brown. Brown, a faculty member at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the National Center on Hunger and Poverty, spoke at a conference on hunger in Augusta last week (the edited text of his speech is published on the opposite page).
Brown's suggestion was borne of frustration. For decades, he's been one of the nation's leading anti-hunger advocates, but he despairs that hunger has become a stubborn and accepted fact of life in America.
"Our job is not going well," he said. "Nobody really expects that our nation's leaders will bring an end to hunger."
Instead, said Brown, we have lowered our sights, and "hunger is no longer considered intolerable."
Brown is correct: We don't try to conquer hunger, we simply address hunger. We help the hungry. We make a huge charitable effort to alleviate hunger. Food pantries are springing up everywhere. In Maine, the number of pantries has grown from 430 five years ago to 600 now.
But as we said in our seven-part series last summer, "For I was hungry," hunger cannot be dealt with largely by charity -- as goodhearted as those giving the charity may be.
Charity is a stop-gap measure. It fixes an immediate problem. But it is an essentially conservative approach: It does not change the reality that hunger is a growing, intractable and endemic problem in our country.
To rely on charity to fix hunger means hunger will never end. As Brown says, charities simply do not have the resources that the federal government has to actually end hunger.
So he says we should close all our food pantries. Send the hungry to the streets and into the halls of Congress, where they must be joined by hunger advocates, who will "no longer be likeable."
Those who want to help the hungry must move from being nice and cooperative players to being noisy advocates, and to do that they must no longer accept, in Brown's words, "timid political leadership."
They must, he says, hold "the collective noses of the new president and congressional leaders to the grindstone."
We agree.





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