“For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out Of Reach” is the title of a recent NPR topical personalized report. Not because people in Ohio are getting shorter, but because they don’t have a job and are suffering the squeezes of a tight budget.
“The Nunez’s van broke down last fall” begins the sob story. Now, Gloria Nunez’s 19-year-old daughter has no reliable transportation out of their subsidized housing complex in Fostoria, 40 miles south of Toledo, to look for a job.
Nunez and most of her siblings and their spouses are unemployed and rely on government assistance and food stamps, says NPR. “Some have part-time jobs, but working is made more difficult with no car or public transportation” they report, which doesn’t sound quite right in the context of the full story which is an attack on the state of the economy.
Nunez, 40, has never worked and has no high school degree. She says a car accident 17 years ago left her depressed and disabled, incapable of getting a job. Instead, she and her daughter, Angelica Hernandez, survive on a $637 Social Security check and $102 in food stamps.
NPR does’nt say if the reason 19 year old Hernandez has a different last name than her mother because she is married to some bum who can’t support her already or what, so who knows, but this part of the report is… interesting:
People tell Nunez her daughter could get more money in public assistance if she had a child.
“A lot of people have told me, ‘Why don’t your daughter have a kid?'”
Ignoring the bad grammar: at least the next line notes that the family rejects that as an option – but as the title of this NPR segment states, the point here is not the bad economy itself or the ability to find a job – its that these poor people aren’t getting enough to eat. They can’t even buy meat for God sakes! awful. They don’t get to that point until the very end, saying (emphasis added by me):
The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it’s more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don’t buy extras like ice cream anymore. Instead, they eat a lot of starches like potatoes and noodles.
7 or 8 bags of groceries down from 12. And they’re having to “cut back” on meat (which is different than the title’s implication that they can’t have it at all”.
NPR is available in every state in the country (it is National Public Radio after all), and how many people do you think were horrified at this sad story? Overwhelming majority, no?
Question 2: How many people do you think would have been equally horrified if they knew that this was Angelica Hernandez (left) and her mother, Gloria Nunez?:
Because… it is. I’m not joking. That is them. You can go to NPR’s website and verify it for yourself.
So there you have it. THESE poor unfortunate morbidly obese people who are having to suffer through eating less meat and ice cream – ICE CREAM for Christ sake – when they go shopping with their food stamps that you and I are paying for (should food stamps even be allowed to be used on “extras like ice cream”?).
I blame Bush.