BOB ABERNETHY: One important lobby is the Christian group Bread for the World, which fights hunger here and abroad. Reverend David Beckmann, a Lutheran pastor, is president of Bread for the World. David welcome.
DAVID BECKMANN (President, Bread for the World): Thank you.
ABERNETHY: Bring us up to date, how many hungry people are there in the United States?
BECKMANN: It’s now 1 in 7 Americans who lives in a household that runs out of food.
ABERNETHY: Runs out of food what? Each month or?
BECKMANN: The typical pattern is the last 2 or 3 days of the month, people run out of food. So the kids may not eat for the last couple days, the mom may not eat for 4 days, it’s 1 in 4 children under the age of 5 who lives in one of those households and that kind of moderate under nutrition does permanent damage to children.
ABERNETHY: Now the supercommittee in Congress failed this week to come up with any plan about the long term control of the deficit. What does that mean for you and the people who are trying to fight hunger? There was to be an across the board cut that was gonna kick in if there was this failure. Is it going to kick in and if so what does that mean for hungry people?
BECKMANN: Well, Bread for the World and other faith groups have been fighting for a circle of protection around funding for hungry and poor people because we can reduce deficit spending without making hungry people hungrier. And we were able to secure in the Budget Control Act that established the super committee and these automatic cuts a provision that will exempt some of the low income programs from cuts if those automatic cuts go into effect. So I would have liked to see the super committee reach a deal but the automatic cuts aren’t necessarily a disaster for poor people.
ABERNETHY: Because of the exemption?
BECKMANN: Yeah, and because people of faith pushed for it.
ABERNETHY: What about overseas? What’s going on there with American food aid?
BECKMANN: Well we were terrified earlier this year because the House of Representatives voted on a deep cut in food aid. Their cut would have thrown 14 million of the world’s most desperate people off food aid rations this year. So we really sounded an alarm about that, we talked to Mr. Boehner’s office, we talked to the President himself and in the final bill which passed this week they backed away from that really disastrous cut for hungry people.
ABERNETHY: A few weeks ago we heard that there were 7 billion people on Earth and the forecast was this would be going up to 9 billion by 2050. Can all those people be fed?
BECKMANN: Well I think we need to curtail population growth, but those people can be fed, and the key is an expansion of the productivity of poor farmers in poor countries. They can grow more to feed their own families, to raise their incomes. That’s where the food will come from for poor countries.
ABERNETHY: You mean rather than have it grown here and shipped someplace else?
BECKMANN: I think expanding demand for food will also be good for US agriculture but the bulk of the supply needs to come from the expansion of poor country, poor farmer agriculture.
ABERNETHY: And this week you came out with a proposal to change the system between the government and farmers in this country. What do you want to do?
BECKMANN: Well, we think it’s possible to develop a system that would be better for farmers especially small medium scale farms, fruit and vegetable growers, better for hungry people, better for a healthy food supply and that would cost the government less money. So this is an area where we want to support cuts but we don’t want the cuts to come from the nutrition assistance to poor people that’s included in the farm bill. On all these things basically we have to create the political will to overcome hunger. When we’ve had that political will to reduce poverty we’ve been able to do it in our country, and that’s what we need to mobilize now.
ABERNETHY: If all the federal aid for hunger, to prevent hunger, went away, could private charities pick up the slack?
BECKMANN: No, absolutely not. People think that but in fact all the food that we collect from all the churches and synagogues in the country, all the food banks, it’s important but it all amounts to 6% of the food that poor people get from the federal food programs. That’s food stamps, school lunches, WIC. So if Congress decides to cut the federal food programs by 6%, 12%, there’s no way that churches and charities can pick up the gap. We need to also get our government to do its part to end hunger.
ABERNETHY: David Beckmann of Bread for the World. Many thanks.
MIKE LLOYD (Kids Against Hunger): When the earthquake struck in Haiti, there was a tremendous outpouring for that event. It went on for several months. We had groups all over country wanting to pack meals, and it was a real scramble for us to meet that demand. Of course, donor dollars followed that demand for packaging the meals. When the Joplin tornado happened, of course we had a similar experience.
WORDSWORTH: I think what we see in both Pakistan, and we’re seeing it very strongly in Somalia, is that — and it really is almost confronting to us – is the lack of belief that people have for that country. So it’s not that they don’t feel compassionate. They just can’t make the connection. They don’t believe that either change is possible there or that their money, or their resources, what they give, will actually translate into something different on the ground. That’s the crisis that we’re seeing.
WORDSWORTH: It’s a whole different side of Somali culture that people don’t normally see. And then through, I think, that lens, you can see a dynamic, amazing group of people and your ability then to believe that if this country is full of people like this, there’s huge hope for that country.
I called Mr. Mathews and said, “Hi, my name is Brenda Williams,” blah, blah, blah, and he said, “I know about you. You don’t have to give me an introduction.”
PATRICIA DUNHAM: I do community service, clean up paper, go to church, be active in my kid’s schooling, come to the meetings once a month, basically easy stuff that’s not hard to do to get a free home, and I thank you very much. (hugs her)
NICK MCCORMAC (The Sumter Item): She doesn’t want people to take things for granted, basically. She wants them to earn it. It’s to give them that empowerment, to make them proud of themselves, to build themselves up so they can go on and own their house or be a voter and be engaged and have that pride that comes along with those kind of things.
DR. JOE WILLIAMS: I for one believe that this is the best country in the world. I believe that we all have to figure out a way to make it better.
DR. JOE: We have problems with men and women not getting together and getting married, or breaking apart in terms of the family, that we really feel very discouraged about.
DR. BRENDA: I need you to sign up. Here’s lime-green paper, it says do right, do right, do right. If you’re part of the Do Right Crew, there’s so many benefits that come along with being part of the Do Right Crew.
DAVID ROTHKOPF: Something like happiness, it sound frivolous, but it’s not frivolous. The purpose of society is to create a better quality of life for all the people. It’s not to create the highest amount of aggregate wealth.
TED LEONSIS, entrepreneur : Maybe you’re lucky and you can start your own business and take it public and sell it, make a lot of money, and declare victory. And I did that in a really compact amount of time, and you get there and think: Is that it? Is that what the dream was all about? It’s not as fulfilling as you were told it would be.
LEONSIS: It really taught me a lot. It’s a year later. No one in our company of 1500 people ever talks about me sitting next to the president of the United States. But they all reference when I cleaned the women’s bathroom and showed empathy.
FATHER MORRIS: Which means connecting to my very origin, my essential origin and somehow developing a relationship with him that gives us purpose, a special type of purpose, and then gives us joy.
GRAHAM: It’s hard to imagine increasing contentment being a goal that we would agree on as a public policy objective, at least not in the United States, which is a very opportunity-focused society. But I do think we could agree that giving more people the opportunity to lead fulfilling lives is an objective of public policy that fits with everything our country is about.
MARTIN: I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding that says that religion needs to be serious all the time and gloomy and dour. A lot of things about religion are serious—it’s concerned about your salvation, the afterlife, suffering, those kinds of things. But I think that we tend to focus so much on that to the exclusion of joy.
MARTIN: If we think of Jesus as a grumpy person and the saints as gloomy people, then it’s going to affect what we think that the sort of model Christian should be, which is grumpy. And I think that’s a real mistake.
LAWTON: Martin has appeared several times on the popular Comedy Central television show The Colbert Report. Comedian host Stephen Colbert calls Martin the program’s chaplain.
SEVERSON: It was his fellow chaplains who took him aside and told him that he was suffering from what has become known as “compassion fatigue.”
Like the soldiers, these chaplains are often in the heat of battle where death is very real and the casualties are friends. Lieutenant Colonel Graeme Bicknell is not a chaplain, but he is an army expert on compassion fatigue.
CHAPLAIN READ: You see the gun shot wounds, the stabbings, the burn patients, all the volatility of the kinds of things you see in a war zone. I mean I recognized there, as a clinically trained chaplain working in a hospital setting how that would affect me in terms of questions of life, death, grief, loss. The things that profoundly become kind of moral, ethical, spiritual aspects of our lives.
CHAPLAIN DUGAL: It is natural for chaplains to weep with those who weep because a lot of these kids, most of these kids are the age of my youngest son and I’m a father to them. There are times that when I reflect about the cost that our military has paid since 911, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to be with them. Because it is an honor.
SEVERSON: Chaplain Greg Cheney served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He says there was a time when what he experienced in combat challenged his faith.