Compassion and the End of SNAP

Hunger as a Political Weapon

Cars line up in the parking lot at a drive-through food pantry at Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids in 2020, at the beginning of COVID. Credit...Neil Blake/The Grand Rapids Press, via Associated Press.

You have heard that the US government – that has $20-$40 Billion to send to Argentina, $1 Billion to rehab a Qatari plane grifted to the POTUS, at least $300 Million plus for a superfluous ballroom, and untold Billions to spend on starting an unprovoked war on . . . Venezuela?? – is going to stop SNAP food benefits for 42 million Americans next week. There is a $6 Billion contingency fund – which they will not allow to be released.

It’s not that we don’t have the money. It’s that we don’t have a conscience.

Compassion, according to Merriam Webster, is “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” And

Compassion and empathy both refer to a caring response to someone else’s distress. While empathy refers to an active sharing in the emotional experience of the other person, compassion adds to that emotional experience a desire to alleviate the person’s distress.

I propose a public general hunger strike, a compassionate fast, paired with donations to your local food banks, until funding for SNAP benefits is restored.

We know from our experience with COVID that our billionaires will be worthless in this crisis. They wouldn’t pay for food or vaccine research when a thousand Americans were dying every day. (Why did we make billionaires, anyway?)

If there is a congressional office near you, tell them what you’re going to be doing and why. Write to your local newspaper editor and/or TV station. If you have the freedom to do so, spend the time when you would be eating sitting outside the offices of the media and members of Congress. If you are close to DC, so much the better.

There must be a way to tie this into Halloween, when we’re distributing sweets (which I love too much, by the way) to children while our government is denying life-sustaining food to our neighbors. Suggestions welcome.

Watch this video, in which Katie speaks of the privation she and her family have known, and offers tips to help people feed themselves. She offers understanding to those forced into intolerable situations, who do whatever it takes, including theft, to feed their families.

When I proposed this on Bluesky, someone responded, “A hunger strike presupposes that the authority responsible is going to feel shame or concern.” WE are the ones who should feel shame if we DON’T do something. Congress is AWOL, so it must be us. A hunger strike presupposes that we – not anonymous outsourced others – must act. That it is a moral imperative for us to act, not just to empathise. It would be shameful *to ourselves* if we did not. The necessary precondition is not anticipated success, but outrage and compassion.

Fast. AND donate. And do both publicly. It will be called “virtue signalling.” No matter: we are willing to be called names if public activism may end the cruelty of our elected officials. We are not willing to let others go hungry in order to avoid criticism of ourselves.

Thanksgiving is coming. So is the shopping season known in the US as “Christmas” (often confused with the religious holiday of the same name.) Beginning a fast and expression of solidarity with our less privileged, more neglected brothers and sisters will serve two purposes.

1. It will be the most apt demonstration of the values of Thanksgiving and (the religious observance called) Christmas: neither is about abundance, but about sharing and, in the latter case, sacrificing (if you remember that part of the story).

2. It will send a warning shot across the bow of corporate America, which is dependent on ever-increasing sales during Thanksgiving and (the shopping season colloquially known as) Christmas.

Corporate America has been eager to kowtow to our conscienceless MAGA government (which claims to be Christian but demonstrates no concern for one’s neighbors, and, ironically, has the same regard for power as Social Darwinists). Trump, Miller, Vought, et al need only glance in the direction of a company for its CEO and board to kneel. Sensing that Thanksgiving and the shopping season may be a bust may help to reawaken their conscience.

Many of those who participated in the #NoKings protests last weekend, almost before they left, asked, “What’s next?” Many want a general strike. Such things take months of planning, and depend on a huge turnout at the start, that one hopes will grow until it’s undeniable. We may still do that; I don’t know what the #NoKings organizers are working on, but everything they’ve done so far has been stellar.

This public general hunger-strike-with-donations has the benefit of requiring no such concentrated effort. We don’t need anyone’s permission. No organization. There will be no weekly fundraising emails, as there would be if this was run by Congress or a political party. It is radically decentralized. “Do. Or do not,” as some sensei once said. As such, it is also radically courageous: you charge, without looking to see if your neighbor is also charging. You know that many of your neighbors are unable to charge, because their government is denying them food that comes with a working society.

We must renew our social contract now. We must remind our neighbors, ourselves, our political parties, and our government that our “work is to love the world.” (Mary Oliver) And so we will. Others are welcome to join us.

We start on November 1.