9,000 Hungry People Fed by Charity on Thanksgiving in SF

Some 9,000 very poor people were fed a decent meal on Thanksgiving Day, 2004 in San Francisco, with 3,000 at St. Anthony's Dining Room and 6,000 at Glide Church. Why is this story not publicized and why is this effort not done by labor?

The full story was in the capitalist Chronicle, 11/26/04, at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/26/BAG60A1QLD1.DTL

Instead, we got all kinds of hysteria about rich people buying things at the stores and the protests of that, and articles telling us what to eat, demonstrating that there is profound ignorance of the realities of the workingclass.

The primary task of any radical community is to insist that the labor organizations aid the workingclass in their needs and interests. These labor unions are dripping with money for huge officer salaries and worthless conventions. They could and should be feeding the poor, and this kind of story should be featured on this website.

For most of the workingclass, those of us who sell our labor for less than $70,000 a year, and especially for the large sector that makes less than $30,000 a year, there is no choice of food and there is no shopping hysteria. These are bourgeois concerns.

Among the workingclass, there is humility and concern for obtaining basic survival nutrition. We are omnivores; we eat vegetables, fish, shellfish and all kinds of meat, when we can get it. It beats starving.

The Money Season, commonly known as Christmas, not only does not exist for those of us who are atheists, Jewish, or any other non-Christian superstition, it does not exist for most of the workingclass.

The 9,000 people who were so desperate that they went to charity for a decent meal are an increase in numbers over last year, in our small city of 750,000 people. Meanwhile, our tax dollars are being wasted in a blood for oil war in Iraq instead of feeding the poor. This is the real war and peace story and this must be our concern.

I hope on Christmas Day, this website will have its photographers and reporters interview the poor standing in the long lines for food at St. Anthony's and Glide Church, and publicize these stories so the world knows that America is sinking into a quagmire of poverty and desperately needs peace.