Trego's Mountain Ear

With the government shutdown, and the loss of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program shut down, I recall a man that I accidentally encountered half a lifetime ago, when I worked at FVCC’s Lincoln County Campus in Libby. There had been a program in the old Gymnasium, giving out food. This guy had received his supplemental food, opened the package, sat down between two cars where he wouldn’t be noticed, and started chowing down on a loaf of bread. I noticed him because one of the cars was mine – and he was both hungry and embarrassed at being seen wolfing down bread without even adding peanut butter.

And I think of SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. I suspect that it has gone to some – possibly a lot of – illegal immigrants. That’s one of those spots where the data isn’t there. And when data isn’t available, it’s a pretty good guess that someone chose to make it unavailable. So be it. I see comments of generations on food stamps. I suspect there are more than a few native borne Americans who qualify there, too. The point is that personally, I like eating too much to want to see anyone as hungry as that guy was over 30 years ago. Then it was the mill and mine closed down – somehow it seems worse when people are going hungry because our elected senators can’t or won’t come to agreement.

See, I could anticipate the mills going down – back in the seventies, the USDA had FIP – the Forestry Incentives Program. Someone had already calculated out that the federal timberland harvests weren’t sustainable. Sure, the Spotted Owl and the Sierra Club got popular credit – but I first heard that the mills wouldn’t last at my eighth grade graduation in 1963. The closures weren’t a surprise – they were seen 30 years earlier – and the forester who predicted it at my eighth grade graduation wasn’t the first to do the calculation. And there was more excuse for the hungry man eating bread without butter or condiment, hidden by my Yugo, then, than there is with the government shutdown.

It’s not like I have no stories of tough times and food stamps. When I took the job teaching at Trinidad State, I showed up at the end of February – and found that my salary for 3 months was going to be paid out in six installments over the next six months. Essentially, I was on half pay and I had definitely not taken a job at double the money. The house I rented was next door to some nice looking duplexes – which I later learned were Trinidad Housing Authority. The lady next door made a point of claiming and borrowing her grandson for the occupancy checks – I’m pretty sure she was tipped off ahead of the checks. On the other hand, the lady next to her was surprised by the occupancy check on a Saturday morning – and I watched her boyfriend head out the back yard, and hurdle a 4 foot fence while wearing only his BVDs and carrying his pants and shoes. If it were an Olympic event, he would have been at least a bronze medalist.

But back to my thoughts at the food stamps – it was about a week after the guy’s escape from the occupancy. Renata and I were down at Safeway as I attempted to find the best marbled chunk of Holstein cow labeled ‘7-bone steak’ and marketed at 78 cents a pound. He and his girlfriend – my neighbor 2 doors down in subsidized housing – were just ahead of us in the checkout line – buying lobster with food stamps. Definitely a day without justice – though 40 years later, I’m sure I have a better story to tell about his run across the backyard, the uphill jump over the fence, and then getting dressed in the alley. I think the housing authority had some rule about a man in the house . . . and the housing authority had a man waiting in the alley the next time they did an occupancy check. So, yeah, I recognize there is some misuse of the system. I resented watching that couple leave the checkout with a lobster while I was carefully selecting the best looking cheapest cut of beef (well, actually the yellow fat attested to it being from a dairy cow). The system did, and likely still does get a bit of abuse.

With the shutdown, I’m thinking of the GS-5’s who are working without pay. Sure, there’s no pay going out for the 11’s, the 12’s, the 13’s – but I remember a COLA under Jimmy Carter, where the GS-4 and 5 employees received a lower percentage than the folks who were 7’s and above. That memory probably tells you where I was in 1979. In 1980, I corrected my 1976 presidential vote, making a personal contribution to Jimmy’s record as a one-term president. I haven’t changed my mind – people’s livelihoods and meals aren’t something to be capriciously used as bargaining chips.

So I’d like to make Congress a little more accessible to the average American. Let any new candidate fund his or her campaign with however much they can raise. On the other hand, limit incumbents to half the funding of their previous campaign. In a couple of elections, that should take care of the incumbent advantage. Then, to make moving to Washington DC affordable, well, Trump has pretty much shut down the department of education. They’re talking about moving a bunch of agencies out into flyover country. That will leave a couple of buildings that can be remodeled into Congressional and Senatorial dormitories. It would be a lot cheaper to live in a dorm than buy a DC house – and security for our elected officials would be easier. A congressional cafeteria in the dorm, armed guards on the doors – think of the savings to the taxpayer. I’ll play with this idea a little more – I like the thought.