Silence Can Kill: Speaking Up to End Hunger and Make Our Economy Work for Everyone - Book - Page 10
Preface
A second obstacle is our silence. Americans by the millions assist hungry people through charity but remain enablers of hunger through their
silence as citizens. Religious congregations, as well as the media, excel in
featuring the response of charity to hunger, especially when disasters occur
or during seasons of giving. As commendable as such encouragement is, it
conveys the impression that charity is the main way or even the only way
citizens have of responding. People are led to think that the role of charity is
far more consequential than the role of government in addressing hunger,
when the opposite is the case by a wide margin. As a result, few of us who
support such charities also urge our members of Congress to act so that the
nation as a whole does its part in addressing hunger and poverty.
The consequence of our silence is more than regrettable. It impairs and
shortens lives on a massive scale. The truth is that you, the reader, and the
impact you can have on our government, are of critical importance in getting
the United States to take leadership in eliminating hunger here and reducing
it abroad. Chapters 4 to 7 explain why charity is much too limited to end
hunger and why government must take the lead.
A third obstacle is our political divide, which hobbles our ability to govern. Two sides tend to speak past each other about the causes of hunger and
poverty rather than sharing insights and finding common ground. Liberals
point to severe inequalities, conservatives to behavioral problems, as though
we face an either/or dilemma. Rigid views lock horns and block solutions,
feeding the view that government is inept at solving problems.
Suppose instead a handful of Democrat and Republican leaders work
across party lines to get Congress to establish, as a dead-serious national
goal, ending the shame of hunger in the world’s richest nation, while accelerating our efforts toward ending it globally. Setting those goals and starting
the process to achieve them would not only save and enhance countless lives;
it would also clarify our vision for addressing extreme inequalities that tie us
in knots and set us against one another. What this book proposes, however,
is not a split-the-difference political compromise, but a bipartisan way forward that reflects the nation’s founding ideals of what America was meant
to be. Getting Congress to take such leadership would give Americans, especially young Americans who have soured on politics, a cause worth embracing and one that could breathe new life into our troubled democracy.
That brings me to the second half of this book—Parts III and IV. Erasing
most hunger in the United States by improving and expanding our current
federal food assistance programs would also reduce poverty, but it would
still leave many Americans poor or nearly so, swimming against a current
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