shutdowns and hunger games

For what it is worth, the local crisis center has put out a call for help: the W.I.C. ("Women, Infants, and Children") nutrition program is shut down along with other federal agencies and programmes. The word has gone out via e-mail to our church members, and doubtless at other local churches. There is a limit to what we can do.

A Huffington Post article about this, written when it was still a prospect for the future.

Locally, they are honoring WIC food vouchers that have already been issued, but no more can be issued until the budget impasse is solved. The situation varies somewhat from state to state, depending on whether a state might be willing or able to fund it temporarily to avoid starving children.

It is of such as this that revolutions are made.

[Added some weeks later... I won't link to it here, but a speech by one of the senators from North Dakota brought my attention to how things have been on the Native American Reservations since the "sequester" began earlier this year. Part of the U.S.'s treaty obligations to the Sioux and other tribes was that, since they were being shoehorned into reservations where they could no longer make a living in the traditional way, the U.S. government would see to it that they are fed, clothed, etc. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has always been chronically underfunded, but was cut even more by the sequester. Here is an analysis of its effect. At this writing, the "shutdown" has been temporarily resolved, but the "sequester" is looking more like a permanent fixture.]