Quote:
Originally Posted by Blingy
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Mead
I'm watching from the opposite side of the fence. While it's sad and unfortunate knowing people are suffering in the hospital and possibly dying the other side of the equation is terrifying.
Six years ago my kids and I started working at a food bank. There were about 20 families that received a box of food every week. Average box had around $150-$200 worth of high quality food. Fresh produce, dairy/eggs, meat, dry goods, etc. filled with donated items. Most families had 2-3 kids, one had 6 kids. Most of these families were escaping some pretty hellish lives from outside our borders. Some families came to the food bank for only a short time, others for years. We also coordinated with 3 other food banks in the area to make sure all the families had at least basic necessities.
Along came covid-19. Even when the initial cases showed up here in the states we started having discussions about "what if" and the like. So when Washington shut down we had a rough guess about how we'd need more food......and we were WAY off. Our food bank had over 100 requests for assistance immediately, the other three were in a similar boat.
We got together with community leaders and other aid organizations. Scrambling to fill requests was exhausting. Yes there was food available but getting it from the farms/ranches/processing plants to the families seemed pretty impossible. The community was as responsive as could be but asking a software developer to drive their Ford F350 (with trailer) from Seattle to Yakima every week to pick up produce for months....yea, not happening. People would rather buy a case of corn and drop it off at a food bank than spend a day a week driving over the pass.
Volunteering at a food bank one day a week with a teenager once a week was a great feeling; today not so much. As time went on more and more people asked for assistance. Many of us are ready to collapse from exhaustion. Today our food bank is supplying food to 700+ families, area-wide we're helping nearly 3,000 families (about 12,500 people). These aren't lazy people but rather people that came to our country, got a minimum wage job but worked their way up to a better paying job only to have things shut down. Imagine going from a $60k/year (this isn't much in Seattle) job supporting your family to working 60 hours a week between 2-3 jobs at minimum wage cleaning carts?
This week is looking pretty abysmal for our "customers". Imagine telling a mother with 2 kids "Here's your 2 cans of corn and 3 packages of top ramen". Yea, that's what I'm going to head out the door to do in a couple hours. Our infection rate over the last 30 days is 1 new case out of 550 people. We're already telling healthy people they have to go hungry because 1 person out of 550 is getting sick.
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But the economic catastrophe is worst in the US precisely because our infections are so out of control. You can tell the serfs to get back to the fields all you want, many people are reluctant or outright refuse to subject themselves to the stroke & lung damage lottery so the stock market can keep humming along. And that's not counting the millions of people who are elderly but not yet retired, or have cardio-respiratory comorbidities or diabetes, who have a very real chance of death from this thing. The current economic situation really isn't a result of the shutdown, which in the United States was very lax and short-lived (here in South Carolina, you could barely tell anything was "shut down" at all), but rather from a critical mass of well-justified avoidant behaviors on behalf of consumers and workers, which will remain as long as the infection is perceived as out of control.
Meanwhile in Italy, where their outbreak used to be as bad as ours, things are getting close to normal with some precautions.
"But the economy", oft used by the right to justify destruction of the environment or any number of things, is a horrible and reductionist refrain and I think it shows in this case. Many other people in this thread have admitted they don't really care who or how many die or get hurt from this thing and I think that's sick.
07-24-2020, 08:39 AM
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