I came across the Fritz Eichenberg woodcut, “Christ in the Breadlines,” when a friend posted it yesterday to his Facebook page. It triggered what follows. Thanks to Michael Redmond for the inspiration.
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1/ Breadlines: A scene outside a church on New Street. Cold morning. Bright sun. Before the doors open. Before COVID. Before the job purge that was still a few months in the future. // Men and women in heavy coats line up. Some stand, some sit in lawn chairs set up by pantry staff. The line snakes around the church’s education building. In view of the county college where I teach. Across from the family court. A block up from city hall. // Twice a week. Wednesday and Saturday. Part of their mission. Like so many pantries across the city. Across the region. About one in seven Americans experience “food insecurity” at some point in a year. This was before COVID. Before the pandemic shuttered so many jobs. // November 2019. The economy is buzzing says the papers. Says the president. But no one told the men and women here. Even in the best of times, the lines at these small pantries are long. //
2/ Breadlines: George Segal’s men wear fedoras and bedraggled trench coats. Protection against the metaphorical rain. Against a Depression that burned through the nation like a blight. The faces. The fierceness. The fear. // "All his anger and hostility came out,” Segal told The New York Times. “He was young and vigorous. He absolutely couldn't get any work. And he was furious, as were most young people at the chaos of the Depression.'' // The blue-gray of the figures. Isolated amid a uniform despair. One man and then another. Robbed of motion. Cast in a permanent inertia. // Nearly a century later, and the bread lines still stretch around corners. The safety net knitted together by FDR shredded by successive presidents. Reagan and the Bushes. Clinton and Obama. Trump. // The lines have grown normal to us. The men and women living on the streets. In the woods. //
3/ Breadlines: There is a glow of the supernatural in Fritz Eichenberg’s breadline. The Christ figure centered in the frame. Hatless head bent forward. In prayer? Another man set among the multitude. A stream of the discarded amid an ocean of plenty. // We are to see the divine in the forlorn and hungry. To see Christ among the destitute. Even the worst among us can see this sometimes. // I am not a believer. But I can hear Isaiah’s words echoing from my Jewish upbringing. To “deal thy bread to the hungry.” // Yes, the churches open their doors. The synagogues. The mosques. They offer food. Shelter. It’s not enough. // The pantries struggle to provide. Collect donations. Sort through the cans of beans and soups. Peanut butter. Pasta. Pancake mix. Divide the food into bags. Distribute it. // Private charities can handle this. A lie. But pantries struggle to keep their own shelves stocked. Collect food from the same people they serve. When things go south, contributions slow to a trickle. Demand easily outstrips supply. Simple economics. //
4/ Soup kitchens and food banks prop up the system. In many ways, they are part of the problem, the long-time director of the region’s largest soup kitchen once told me. They’re like the little Dutch boy plugging holes in the dyke with his fingers. They can’t keep up. But they allow us to pretend we are doing something. // The hungry. The poor. The homelesss. They are not a bug in the system. Not something that we can eliminate without altering the larger structure of the economy. They are permanent, necessary, to the functioning of capitalism. The by-product of global systems designed to enrich a few. To use up and then discard workers as though they were just raw material. Like coal. Petroleum. Wood. // A broader strategy is needed, she would say. A more sustainable one that builds self-reliance. That focuses on local production and healthy food. // It’s possible, but unlikely. Capitalism’s profit motive favors cheaply produced food. Mass-produced processed food. And a distribution system that privileges those that have. Those without are left to the good graces of others. //