By KAREN PARKER
County Line Publisher Emeritus
Unless you happen to have a soon-to-be-graduate in the family, you might not have given much thought to the totally upside- down world these kids are about to parachute into.
If they planned to join the work force, they may have had the job offer rescinded as companies close down and grapple with their own uncertain future.
If further education was in their future, will schools even open in the fall? Can they afford to go if the family has lost their jobs? And what careers will be needed? Healthcare was always asafe bet, but it is now experiencing massive layoffs. Teaching? Schools are likely to experience budget constraints as they have never known while government jobs of all sorts, once a mainstay, are drying up like daisies in a drought.
Anyone who thinks this was a brief hiatus and we will soon pick up where we left off in February needs a reality check.
We can’t give kids a walk across the stage or a chance to toss their mortar boards in the air or a big party. At the County Line, about all we can do is create a special section they can tuck into a scrapbook and pull out some day to tell their own kids about the “time of the pandemic.”
We will not only run photos, but also go back to the old days, when we included a little biography of each student.
If you would like to be part of this effort, see our instructions on the back page. We usually look for sponsors in the business community,but we will not seek support from those who have been closed. They have enough problems.
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It would seem under the circumstances that farming would offer a future. You can live without a new car or a cruise or getting your hair done, but one thing we all share in common is the annoying habit of eating.
Is there anything more depressing than a split screen showing miles of unemployed lined up for boxes of food while farmers are dumping milk, plowing down vegetables and now threatening to kill animals for which they have no market.
Ironically, it was Agricultural Secretary Sonny Perdue who called Covid-19 a “pandemic” in February, when his boss, Donald Trump, was still downplaying it as a bad case of the flu that would disappear in the warm weather.
You may recall Perdue as the fellow who came to Madison last year and pronounced the family dairy farm dead, winning the hearts and minds of our state’s teat-pullers.
Perdue is another of the sleepy old guys in the Trump cabinet who snoozes off in the corner with Ben Carson, enjoying the title, but not doing much else.
If he was paying attention, he would know that one of the major problems after the 1918 Spanish flu was a food shortage. So many farm workers had died of the flu that it was a struggle to supply food to the nation. And that was when 30 percent of the population was farming and had access to their own meat and produce. Now less than one percent of our population lists farming as its occupation.
For years I have ranted that too many folks are certain their food grows on the shelves of the grocery store. It appears that some of the millions now turning to food banks/pantries have just discovered that is not the case. When the food they had taken for granted is in short supply, that fancy house, new pickup and plump stock-market earnings are not worth a thing.
Food comes to your table from the hands of hardworking farmers, often laboring under ruinous farm policy. It comes from undocumented immigrants bent over for hours picking crops in the hot sun. It comes from asylum seekers and refugees willing to work in slaughterhouses under conditions so grueling that average Americans will not take the job.
Somehow the “killers and rapists” that the Trump administration was determined to keep out with a wall have become “essential workers.” Many now carry letters from their employers declaring that the Department of Homeland Security has found them critical to the food supply chain. Have a dose of hypocrisy with your tumbler of Lysol.
But back to Sonny Perdue, who evidently discovered last week that folks were going hungry, many of them possibly Republican voters who were among the 26 million who lost their jobs.
The Trump administration previously tried to implement stricter work requirements for food stamp recipients, which were supposed to go into effect on April 1, according to The New York Times.
The new rule would have resulted in nearly 700,000 people losing their SNAP benefits, according to the USDA estimates.
So about two months into this health crisis, Trump signed a bill authorizing the monthly benefit for a family of five to increase by $240 from $768. That amounts to $2.24 per meal per family member. Evidently neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Perdue has been grocery shopping lately.
And if getting food stamps goes as smoothly as getting unemployment — don’t start the grill.
Last I looked, the government had 1.3 billion pounds of cheese in storage. We have an Army that is very good at logistics and creating supply chains. Why should anyone in this country go hungry?
Is it because the richest country in the world appears to have a failed government that is unable to marshal its resources to care for its citizens?