| Reprinted from the Carolina
Peacemaker, June
18, 1998, Greensboro, North Carolina
"What Does a
Person Deserve By Being a
Person?" [ "Feeding America
(formerly Second Harvest) is annually
providing food to 37 million Americans, including 14 million children. This is an increase
of 46 percent over
2006, when we were feeding 25 million Americans, including 9 million
children, each year." - updated
statistics
from Hunger in
America 2010 - NH ]
Statistics from the study titled "Hunger, 1997: The Faces and Facts" were released recently by Second Harvest, the nation's largest charitable food program, that 26 million Americans received emergency food from them and their affiliate organizations last year. The study reports that 38% were children under age 18 -- almost 8 million children. I am very grateful and respect the work of organizations like Second Harvest -- but it is a horrible, shameful fact that in our bountiful land so many millions of men, women, and children are forced to be hungry, to worry about getting enough food to eat!
Thirty-nine percent
of these households had one working adult whose income still was not
enough
to feed his or her family -- "My husband works," said a mother of two
quoted
in the study, "but at the end of the month we just run out of money. I
wouldn't know what to do if it weren't for the food pantry." An
employed
nurse and single mother said, "I never thought I’d be in this situation
....Requiring emergency food assistance in today's blossoming
environment
is one thing that the public doesn't understand."
Despite the
fact that each day we hear reports on how well our economy is doing
[this is hardly the case in 2013],
the
truth is America's economy is not blossoming. It was just last year
they
couldn't keep out of the news the massive layoffs, huge increases in
temporary
workers, loss of benefits, uncounted business failures, emergency
bailouts
and mergers. I want your readers to know what I learned, which explains
the reason for this continuing economic anguish, causing parents such
terrible
despair and the small bodies of children described in this report to
hurt
each day from hunger -- and what will have this unbearably cruel
situation
truly change.
Eli Siegel asked, "What does a person deserve by being a person?"The great American educator Eli Siegel, founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, explained beginning in 1970 in a series of historic lectures that the profit system -- in which a few people own privately and make profit from what all people need -- has failed and will never recover because it is based on contempt for people. He asked then this urgent ethical question, "What does a person deserve by being a person?," and he wrote: "There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries" [Goodbye Profit System: Update,Definition Press, NY].
Mr. Siegel defined
contempt as "the addition to self through the lessening of something
else,"
and he showed that the desire for contempt is the most hurtful thing in
every human being. The food our country can produce so abundantly --
the
wheat, the milk, the vegetables, the fruit -- does not get to nourish
the
bodies of millions of people who need it simply because someone must
make
profit from it. And the people who do the work -- drive the tractors,
harvest
the grain, milk the cows -- are not getting what they deserve, either,
because large corporations, CEOs and stockholders, take the profit
which
their labor produces, and there is increasing anguish in America from
farm
foreclosures. "To whom should America's wealth go?"What America needs is described with beautiful honesty and feeling by Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, in the international journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known; this is from issue #1212, "The Ethics of Poetry or the Pain of Children": "Poor ... means something: for a person to come home worn out from long work day after day, and look into the face of his child and feel, "I can't give you the food you would like and need" -- is shocking, though it has gone on for hundreds of years....I passionately agree! Only when the wealth of America goes to every child and every person in America, Mr. Siegel showed, will our economy be efficient and flourish. That crucial question he first asked in 1970 must be asked and answered honestly by everyone, including all elected officials: "What does a person deserve by being a person?" I am unboundedly grateful to Aesthetic Realism that my contempt was described and kindly criticized, and I was able to change from a narrow, selfish person to one who cares about what other people deserve -- and is ever so much happier for it! Persons on the press and in the media have viciously boycotted this needed education for over five decades out of fury they cannot be superior to Aesthetic Realism's intellectual scope and grandeur and the integrity of its founder, Eli Siegel. But I am very glad to say that despite this brutal boycott, Aesthetic Realism is becoming known in America. I urge people to call or write for information from the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, New York, NY 10012, 212-777-4490 -- and you can also visit the website at www.AestheticRealism.org. Nancy Huntting is
an Aesthetic Realism consultant living in New York City where she is on
the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. She has written and
spoken
extensively on how the principles of Aesthetic Realism explain the
questions
of women, past and present.
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