Last week, Rocky and I finally made it to the Emergency Food Shelf Networks Donor Appreciation event.  We have been regular contributors for years now…I think about seven years or so.

We have wanted to go to this event for years, but something always seemed to come up.  This year, we were going to make it.  Not even torrential rains could stop us.  We made arrangements for our nine-year-old, and allowed our thirteen-year-old to stay home alone, and took off.

The weather had been cloudy and ominous for most of the day.  We’d heard the news about major storms on the radar, moving toward us even as the weather seemed mild if not entirely pleasant.  As we drove, though, it got worse.  We started to worry that it had been a mistake, worried that the severe weather that was supposed to pass to the south of our home would swing north, worried that the weather north of us would swing south.  Worried that flooding might cut us off from an easy route home.  But we persevered, and eventually broke through into a pocket of mild weather.

We were greeted warmly, and given name tags, a ten-pound bag of groceries, and pointed at the hospitality table and wine bar.  We were introduced to the staff and the board, and then asked to introduce ourselves and tell how we came to be contributors to the EFN.

I thought about growing up in rural Minnesota.  A lot of the kids I knew came from working poor families.  Their parents worked a couple of part-time jobs, or worked odd hours in the evenings and weekends in service jobs.  Everything in their lives appeared to be cobbled together.

Their families were often cobbled together, with a mom and a live-in boyfriend and kids, or a Dad and a stepmom and kids with foster children taken in to help out with the money situation.

Their cars were cobbled together, with body parts from other cars, multi-colored one-eyed monsters with quirks of functionality that only their owners could understand and deal with.

Their livelihood was cobbled together from odd jobs, part-time jobs, public assistance, government commodity foodstuffs, and private assistance.

They were proud, hardworking people, and most of the time they were able to do everything necessary to meet the needs of their family.  There was rarely any time when they had more than enough of anything…but most of the time they had enough.  It was just that sometimes, when the car broke down and dad couldn’t fix it with a part cannibalized from a junkyard, or when someone had to go to the doctor, or when there was a fire or some other mishap, or when there was a lay-off, they needed help.

Kind of like our trip to the event, there was a continuous background air of worry occasionally interrupted by moments of true danger that they had to preserver through to get to the other side.

Minnesota’s food shelves are an important part of what makes their lives work.  The stresses of being among the working poor take their toll on mental and physical health, on marriage and family life, on every aspect of existence.  Yet it is the working poor of this country that our relative prosperity is built upon.  Just tune in to any discussion about the plight of the working poor in this country and you will hear it between the lines, unspoken in so many words, but unmistakably clear.

We can’t raise the minimum wage, or implement even a bare-bones universal health care system.  In fact, every social justice proposal, no matter how modest or how needed, is shot down for the same reasons:  Businesses would plunge into bankruptcy, employment would drop.  The economy would sink.  The price of everything would skyrocket.  We can’t afford to institutionalize solutions that will bring prosperity to everyone.  Or so the argument goes.

Instead, we’re supposed to swallow the messages of self-reliance and isolation.  People are coming to take what’s yours.  Crime is on the rise.  Your country is being invaded by immigrants, your neighborhood is being invaded by people who don’t belong there.  Protect what’s yours.  Buy a gun, buy a lock, vote against taxes and public programs that leech your hard-earned money from your pocket book. 

But things are changing.  We heard in the presentation that the face of hunger is changing in Minnesota.  Hunger used to be an urban problem, they told us (they didn’t talk about rural hunger, but then again, no one really does).  But lately, the greatest increases in hunger and need for food shelf services have been suburban.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of a 48% increase.

Contributions are going down, and demand is going up.  The demographic that used to be contributors are increasingly becoming recipients.  And sadly, there has been about a 40% increase in the use for food shelf services among seniors.  The anecdotes they gave from seniors that shared their plight as they came for help overwhelmingly centered around needing to use the foodshelf because prescriptions prices had taken over their food budget.

I recently told this to a person I know who is very conservative and has lived her whole life in the upper-middle class.  I said “Isn’t that scary?”  She replied, “Yes, it is.  All those people from the city are fleeing to the suburbs.”

I blinked.

“I think it’s more likely that an almost fifty percent increase would be caused by all those people who, statistics have been showing falling out of the middle class and into the working poor class.”

Her reply: “Oh.  Maybe.”  Shrug.  Change of subject.

What can I say, some people see the storm coming, and some people live in their own little patch of sunshine until the storm takes them by surprise.