Yesterday evening I moderated a community discussion group in Denver about Health Care Reform, the Environment and Education. The goal was to identify the biggest areas of concern within these topics and to plan service projects that would address the issues.
Needless to say those who attended became overwhelmed and quickly caught up in a haze of thoughts about where to start. Should we look for the person who started these problems? How intertwined is each issue with the next? How do ordinary citizens analyze where the corruption is and take ethical actions to help heal our country and then create new systems? It took a discussion that was sometimes very frustrating, but in the end rewarding, to realize that unless we address the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter in our communities that, among other things, medical care, the environment and education will take care of themselves – people might not survive long enough to need them.
Some of the concrete numbers of those ‘going without” are entirely frightening. An estimated 5 million seniors regularly sacrifice food to pay bills. At least 29% (almost 1/3) of Americans skip medical care to pay for basic food, clothing or shelter.
According to the US Department of Agriculture over 12 percent of Americans (36.2 million adults and children) did not have enough food to maintain active and healthy lives in 2007 and nearly two million US jobs have been lost.
The U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates that this year, heating a home with oil, will increase 33% from last year and is a 117% increase since 2004. The cost of heating a home with natural gas has gone up 30% since 2004. The cost of heating with propane, which heats homes in many rural areas across the nation, has increased 23% in the last year and 73% since 2004.
Foreclosures are up: 1.2 million. This number is a 42 percent increase from 2005. The percentage change in foreclosures is up a 700 percent from 2005 to 2006.
These numbers are not all about those you see living on the streets – they are also your neighbors. Some of them live in my nice, comfortable neighborhood in Denver – for now anyway, until they miss another mortgage payment and receive a foreclosure statement or lose their jobs and begin worrying about food and clothing and then can’t pay their mortgage or rent.
And does it really matter how it happened or who is responsible for fraudulent mortgages or overspending. Not really; not today anyway. The problem is way too big for blame.
What the community group decided last night was to begin a campaign of fund raising to help a family in danger of losing their home. One group, collecting money for one family – simple. Our goal – change. Another group we work with is doing a food drive in January - another action that doesn’t take weeks, months and years of planning, proposals, vetoes and votes. It’s just people helping people. Perhaps that’s where we went wrong way back – maybe we thought people were someone else’s responsibility.
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