To the Editor:
The Feb. 22 editorial, “The table of plenty” prompted memories I’d rather not speak of, but feel I must. My dad died from alcoholism when I was 30. He wasn’t evil. I didn’t hate him. In fact, I pitied him. Still, he spent half of his paycheck on booze, the other half left for my mom and us four kids. A good friend recently shared that her dad was an alcoholic, too, when she was a child.
Both of our families received government-supplied food boxes akin to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s Harvest Box initiative. We both remembered that the canned meat was quite tasty. We think Sonny Perdue has a good idea. We both ache for the children of parents who make poor decisions because we’ve been there, lived that. Wealthy people have no monopoly on vice; poor people have no monopoly on virtue. I could give many examples: delivering mail in poor neighborhoods, delivering food to food pantries and meal sites as a volunteer, and encounters with people asking for money in parking lots.
One guy called the Salvation Army meals “crap.” They are not! I’ve tasted them. Even the paralyzed man had sins Jesus forgave before he was physically healed. Others helped feed us when we were kids; now we support a similar program for today’s hungry children.
Mary Rourke
Davenport
