Worlds Apart

Not that you've asked, but it's 137.1 miles from Joseph Perkins Road here in Norwich to the New York Stock Exchange at 11 Wall Street in the financial district of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Google Maps suggests it's about a two and a half-hour drive, I'm guessing with a good tailwind. 

Of course, I was thinking it was a lot farther away than that while out walking late Friday morning after encountering cars and trucks bumper to bumper at the intersection of  Crescent and Rockwell Streets with a line of traffic snaking down Rockwell and then left onto the McKinley Street Extension going beyond the intersection with Coles Court and about two car lengths away from all the way back to where McKinley Street Extension ends and Reynolds Road begins.    

It was only when I got there I realized the actual start of all the traffic was where Perkins, McKinley, and Reynolds intersected and that cars and trucks went all the way back down Perkins, to where it intersected with Crescent and in essence, formed a snake eating its own tail. 

The vehicles at the tip of the spear were part of just one of the caravans at various locations and times throughout Norwich in the Farmers to Families program, providing fresh meat, produce, and dairy products to those in need as a result of the coronavirus pandemic (that was going away in the warm weather like a miracle if memory serves me correctly. Except, of course, it didn't and the ripples of the pandemic continue to expand ever wider, impacting more and more of us). 

Around the time the first boxes were being placed in cars, back on Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 28,528.03 points, making someone, somewhere feel a lot better, I suspect. 

There were four distribution sites in addition to the Norwich Free Academy, three of them drive-thru, including United Community and Family Services at 47 Town St., Greeneville Neighborhood Revitalization Zone, at St. Mary’s Church parking lot, 70 Central Ave., as well as boxes for Norwich Public Housing residents, 10 Westwood Park, and for residents of the AHEPA housing complex, 380 Hamilton Avenue, offering 1,200 prepackaged boxes of food and about 200 gallons of milk, Each food box had five pounds of meat, five pounds of produce, and five pounds of dairy products (like butter and cheese) as well as a gallon of milk for each recipient

The US Department of  Agriculture Coronavirus Food Food Assistance Program purchased about four billion dollars of food from large and small producers who'd been hurt by closures of restaurants, and schools precipitated by the pandemic and hired distribution companies who'd also been hit hard economically to package and transport the food across our country. 

Agencies including United Community Family Services, Gemma E. Moran United Way/Labor Food Bank, St. Vincent de Paul Place soup kitchen, Norwich Human Services, as well as U.S. Foods, encouraged by Mayor Nystrom and other public officials, joined forces in what’s intended to be a continuing outreach of neighbors helping neighbors for as long as needed and supplies last. Right now, I'm still angry that we have come to this in the Land of Milk and Honey and see the gallant local effort as little more than trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon and hoping I'm wrong.

You didn't miss reading about any of this or seeing pictures in your newspaper over the weekend because there was no coverage but you can see compassion in action thanks to photographs by Zechariah Stover and Greeneville Neighborhood Revitalization Zone on Facebook. 

As I walked past the rows of cars and trucks near NFA, the faces of those in the vehicles told the same story over and over again, of both hope and fear. Hope, because, help was literally around the corner but fear because what if all the boxes were gone by the time you got to the head of the line? 

I've seen those looks in newsreels of East German citizens back in the days of the Cold War queuing up for food that ran out often before the shop doors opened but never here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, what West Germans always called "Das Land der Unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten," The Land of Unlimited Possibilities. Except right now, it's Hard Times in the Land of Plenty. While some crow loudly about all the gains made in recent years in the Stock Market, Wall Street sure as hell isn’t Main Street. Ask anyone you see in a car hoping there’s just one more food box. 
-bill kenny