Consider it the miracle of the mundane and so familiar we don’t even notice it.
It's probably a scene out of the movie made at your house, too, on many winter mornings. The soundtrack always includes the furnace coming on or already on as you kick off the covers, get out of bed, and begin the day.
Your house is warm, perhaps even cozy, by the time you're ready for breakfast before you head out to school or to work. Yeah, for a lot of us, that's our weekday routine and we've grown comfortable with it, to the point we may not realize others open their eyes in a cold house and must face tough daily decisions for themselves and their families before the coffee or cocoa assuming there is any of either, is even finished.
We are in the 'holiday season' (from around Thanksgiving through the New Year) and tend to be a bit more attentive to and observant of the scene around us in terms of who has enough and who needs a helping hand.
We’ve all been there, or think we have. The tough times, when money is tight, and we know what the struggle feels like, but if you're reading this, I think we can agree both you and I are better off, vastly better off, than many who live not just in our state but perhaps on our street.
I’m not talking about the people we pass at the entrance to shopping centers holding cardboard signs and hoping for a moment of human contact and some spare change-at least, I’m not talking only about them.
New England winters can be bone-numbingly cold, but when you're choosing to pay your heating bill or to buy groceries, we're looking at a decision that can freeze your heart and crush your hope. In a nation that prides itself on how we care for and about one another, Heat or Eat should be a turn of phrase none of us has ever heard or used.
Every time I visit a local grocery store, like so many others, I add a canned good or two to my order as a donation to St. Vincent de Paul Place, but I have no illusions, nor should you, as we walk away from the cashier that we've 'handled' the problem with a random can of creamed corn.
During the last fiscal year, they provided almost 100,000 hot breakfasts and lunches to our community and supported over 25,000 visits to their food pantry (helping nearly 2,500 households including 1,000 new households) with over five hundred tons of food. And still, the need remains.
Regular donations to St. Vincent de Paul Place and Connecticut Foodshare too often feel like we're using a teaspoon to empty an ocean, especially when almost four hundred thousand Connecticut residents each month need some form of assistance from an agency supported by the Foodshare.
Over 80,000 children living in Connecticut are "food insecure" (= no reliable access to enough affordable and nutritious food). That is 80,000 too many. The solution to this problem isn't in Washington or Hartford, it's in each of us.
This is the season of giving so how about it? Time, talent, treasure, it's your choice, Together, we can change the world, one meal at a time, every time.
-bill kenny
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