What is the real pro-family agenda? Defending the living wage, the family holiday, the Freedom from Want, that's what!

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Joel's  third step is important:  watch how your member of Congress acts, and votes, on food assistance.  Reward or punish him or her for his/her votes on the so-called food stamps!
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The War on Thanksgiving: Where are the ‘pro-family’ forces?
By Joel Connelly, November 27, 2013

The sight of “big box” stores opening their doors on Thanksgiving bespeaks an obvious, insidious objective:  The bottom-line boys in America’s corporate boardrooms are out to destroy this holiday as a time for the country to stop its daily grind and come together with family and extended family.

With more and more stores open — Walmart, Target, Kmart, Staples, OfficeMax, Gap — the “idolatry of money” (Pope Francis’ term) is taking away the possibility of Thanksgiving for those who don’t have the resources or the prestigious jobs to just say “No!” to work.

A  question flashes to mind:  Where are the “traditional values” and “pro-family” groups?

Why don’t those who get lathered up (for publicity purposes) about a “war on Christmas” speak up about what is a REAL war on Thanksgiving?  Corporate America is in the process of turning a holiday with deep religious roots into a workday.

We are witnessing, this year, what is a two-front war — at least in terms of the bounty we associate with Thanksgiving and what has been the prosperity of our country.

On one front, low-income workers are forced to spend Thanksgiving away from families.  The “family wage job” is becoming an endangered species in America.  The middle class is eroding.  Seeking the American dreams, for the disadvantaged, is becoming a grind of two (or more) jobs.

The Thanksgiving dinner used to symbolize the “Freedom from Want,” one of the “Four Freedoms” which President Franklin D. Roosevelt said was our purpose in fighting World War II.  The scene of a family Thanksgiving, as drawn by Norman Rockwell, graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Now, we’re just trying to “make ends meet” with the ends getting more and more elusive.

And some in Washington, D.C., are setting out to make that harder.

U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., a member of the House Republican leadership, on Wednesday sent out a lovely greeting, wishing her Eastern Washington constituents a “happy and blessed” Thanksgiving.  “Our hearts are full. Full of joy, love and gratitude for the things and people that matter most,” she wrote.  “Together, let us give thanks for the many blessings of our lives.”

She, and the House majority, voted last month to cut 3.8 million Americans off food stamps in 2014, and to slice $40 billion in the next 10 years out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., who chairs the subcommittee overseeing food stamps, voted for the cuts as well.

In 2012, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) kept almost 5 million people — including 2.2 million American kids — out of poverty.

About 91 percent of SNAP assistance goes to families with incomes below the poverty line, 55 percent to families earning less than half the federally set poverty level.

The Great Recession, America’s largest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, saw the number needing and getting SNAP assistance rise by 20 million.  These were not idlers or loafers or welfare queens.  They were working Americans, who worked hard and played by the rules — and lost their jobs.

Hunger is real.  Riverton United Methodist Church in Tukwila hosts a “food pantry” three days a week.  Each draws about 120-130 people.  Are they working people?  “Yes, some with two jobs,” Rev. Jan Bolerjack, the church’s minister, said at a minimum-wage rally on Wednesday.

Not only is SNAP needed in places like McMorris Rodgers’ Eastern Washington district — 14 percent of her constituents have received food assistance — but growing and processing that food has sustained farmers in places like Whitman and Lincoln and Asotin counties.

“Historically, this has been a bipartisan accord.  Nutritional programs have helped people in cities, while food growing has helped agricultural communities.  Lately, however, the ideological opposition to this has reached a fever pitch,” Rep. Steve Israel of New York, in town this week, said in an interview.

What is to be done to defend Thanksgiving?  Wonderful words from the Sunday night Compline service at St. Mark’s Cathedral come to mind:  “Resist, steadfast in the faith.”

– An obvious step:  Box the ears of the “big box” stores open on Thanksgiving.  Take your business to companies showing the decency to observe this holiday, like our Seattle-based Costco, Nordstrom and REI.

Reward Radio Shack’s CEO for the words he spoke in a Wednesday interview that his stores were staying shut “in honor of Thanksgiving and the time-honored tradition of gathering with family and friends.”

– A second step:  Ignore “Black Friday” — a suitable name for a madhouse day — and observe Nov. 30 as Small Business Saturday.  It is a day to poke around in such charming downtowns as Edmonds,  LaConner and Langley, or neighborhoods like Madison Park, rather than the surrounding malls.  Buy your books at Moonraker in Langley, rather than online.

– The third step:  Watch how your member of Congress acts, and votes, on food assistance.  A House-Senate conference committee is writing a new Farm Bill.  A Senate-passed version trims $4 billion from food assistance in the next decade.  The House, with its $40 billion in cuts, has wielded a meat axe.

The “Greatest Generation,” which lived through the Great Depression and triumphed in World War II, put everything on the line for the Four Freedoms.  It came home from war to build an American middle class. And that middle class lifted all boats, and brought the country its greatest years of prosperity.

We must stop and reverse its gradual erosion.   Defending the living wage, the family holiday, the Freedom from Want — “an essential human right,” as Roosevelt called it — that is the real pro-family agenda.  That is the real upholding of this country’s traditional values.
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