I mix in quite varied circles. One day I might be helping at my rural hometown food pantry, and the next, enjoying my home away from home, the Union League Club of Chicago, a 23-story country club in the heart of the city.
When I was a boy 60 years ago, I like to think there were some ties, maybe quite loose, I admit, between rich and poor in a nation then largely of small towns and cities. I worry that those ties have been mostly severed.
The all-volunteer food pantry does a fine job of providing almost bounteous food stuffs once a month to 60 families, which range in size from one to eight, the last a household of three generations. This represents almost 10 percent of the area population.
A faith-based food bank in Peoria and a non-profit operation in the Quad-Cities make deliveries once a month in 18-wheeler trucks to food pantries like ours. The food is often top-of-the-line overstock or near-expiration stuff donated by big box grocers and food manufacturers.
Anyone can partake of the food pantry, with amounts doled out varying by size of family.
I estimate a family of four receives on a good month (amount of food delivered varies) nearly 100 pounds of dry, canned and frozen food. I further estimate this amount represents enough food for about one-third of the monthly meals of the family and has a retail value approaching $400.
Recipients can also receive food stamps from the government and go to other food pantries in the county, no questions asked. If a food emergency arises, the food pantry can add more food later in the month.
The recipients include a young woman, in her 30s I would guess, with children at home. She is suffering from an apparent neuro-degenerative disease. She struggles mightily to get from her friend’s vehicle into the food pantry, relying on a walker on wheels that also includes a seat for her to rest on.
The young lady’s cheery, buoyant personality amazes and humbles this old depressive.
A number of the recipients, ranging from young to old, men and women, have washed-out, defeated looks about them, any pride they once had squeezed out for whatever reasons.
My fellow volunteers are wonderful, non-judgmental sorts, though we do tsk-tsk just a bit about the lady who called in, after receiving her monthly allotment, to seek emergency food.
“I’m having company over,” she explained.
And we sigh as an apparently able-bodied man leaves with his allotment, shouting out jauntily, “See ya’ next month.”
At the other end of the world, in the ULCC, successful up-and-comers take a break from their busy professions. They swim indoors, take lunch poolside, play handball, have a drink in one of the several restaurants and bars in the club, and go to the walnut-paneled club library for a book-signing by famed historian David McCullough.
Members at the ULCC have clearly won the game of life, at least in material terms. With the exception of a relatively few farmers who each sit on thousands of acres of good farmland, many of those in rural America have lost the game.
What worries me is that the two worlds I sketch here all too briefly no longer have any connection whatever to one another.
As I have written in this space before, in my childhood the owner of the small town’s manufacturing plant sent his children to the same public school in town as did the janitor and tenant farmer. No longer; his kids likely live on Chicago’s tony North Shore, oblivious in their lakefront enclave to my food pantry recipients.
Many, not all, of my friends in the upscale world resent the food pantry recipients for not trying harder, while the latter resent the rich for having so much. Resentments won’t address problems.
The liberals among my friends would address the challenges of the poor by providing them more government support; my conservative friends, less.
But such isn’t really at the heart of the problems of those struggling in my hometown.
The problems are inadequate parenting and educational nurturing, low expectations, loss of pride, lack of a larger worldview, fear of striking out toward success.
I think we need national service for every young person, as is Israel. This would mix us up in our early years, when we could learn from one another and expand our vision of what is possible.
Further, everyone needs to contribute, give back at least something to society, to reduce resentments.
I wish we could somehow re-string the ties that bind.
Jim Nowlan of Toulon served two terms in the Illinois House and worked under three governors. He co-wrote “Fixing Illinois: Politics and Policy in the Prairie State.” Contact Nowlan at jnowlan3@gmail.com.