{"id":1301,"date":"2009-06-03T11:15:16","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T16:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2009-06-04T02:12:20","modified_gmt":"2009-06-04T07:12:20","slug":"why-not-give-at-the-po","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2009\/06\/why-not-give-at-the-po\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Not Give at the P.O."},"content":{"rendered":"

(Yes, Eudora, there is a great short story<\/a> titled “Why I Live at the P.O.”)<\/small><\/p>\n

During the boom economy, canned food drives always seemed odd to me. When a supermarket had a barrel near the door for customers to place an extra food staple for the poor, I would not comply. It was so blatant how the grocery manages to take its percentage first. Yet I usually gave pantry items to off-site drives for homeless shelters and the like. Some years I’d leave food for the mailman<\/a> to pick up. Now that the economy has turned, it’s even more important that nonprofits insist that businesses donate to these groups (whose needs surely are growing) at the wholesale level. Isn’t it perverse for every business up and down the line to first make a buck off the poor even as it brands itself benevolent?<\/p>\n

Now in my Fayetteville, Mayor Lioneld Jordan is setting up a permanent can dropoff<\/a> schedule: “When I ran for office, one thing I said we’d do is have a yearlong food drive.”<\/p>\n

While I don’t want wholesalers or the stockrooms of individual groceries to dump dented or bloated cans on those who need the best nutrition, aren’t these the most economically efficient and least hypocritical places from which to gather food donations?<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

In the world of beneficial agencies, Northwest Arkansas has the Care Foundation, set up in 1998 from profits of the sale of the Northwest Health System. The morning paper writes up one of its periodic grant releases<\/a>, this set for educational programs.<\/p>\n

Chris Stecklein, Care program officer, noted one program “helps build life experiences for students who are relatively new to the country. A trip to the Walton Arts Center, for example, provided one student his first ride in an elevator.<\/p>\n

‘We try to work with schools to develop innovative ways to provide kids experiences they may not have had otherwise,’ he said.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Don’t frown. Don’t you see the bright side? At least tax money isn’t going for rides to the theater balcony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Yes, Eudora, there is a great short story titled “Why I Live at the P.O.”) During the boom economy, canned food drives always seemed odd to me. When a supermarket had a barrel near the door for customers to place an extra food staple for the poor, I would not comply. It was so blatant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-body-home-street"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":240,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/10\/tax-the-poor\/","url_meta":{"origin":1301,"position":0},"title":"Tax the Poor","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"October 11, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Replace the grocery tax; don't repeal it. (This is an Arkansas Brick.) It's not too late to put in your 6 cents' worth -- that's the amount of state sales tax in Arkansas, before municipalities add on theirs. Nothing can happen until the Legislature convenes in January, but various state\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4328,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2013\/06\/omnivores-manifesto\/","url_meta":{"origin":1301,"position":1},"title":"An Omnivore’s Manifesto","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"June 15, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"We're trying veganism, My Beloved and I, now in our 11th week of cutting the ovo-lacto from our comfortable vegetarianism of over two decades. Look Out For That Bus! It'd been a year since my last fasting cholesterol blood test. The results so floored my doctor a week ago --\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "American Culture"","block_context":{"text":"American Culture","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/american-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"The Power Plate diet diagram of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/PowerPlategraphichirez-300x285.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":72,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2004\/05\/down-to-the-level\/","url_meta":{"origin":1301,"position":2},"title":"Down to the level","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"May 5, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, May 5, 2004. A note about the U.S. MPs' sexual and general humiliation of Iraqi civilian\/military detainees. Here's The New Yorker's link to photos and articles. Jews are not supposed to make Holocaust comparisons lightly and don't want non-Jews to make any at all.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1017,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2009\/03\/free-blockheads\/","url_meta":{"origin":1301,"position":3},"title":"Free Blockheads","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"March 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock A newsmagazine commentary from a couple of weeks ago stopped me cold. I still think about it, in a similar way a comic panel from last year comes up, which has put me off Outback's Bloomin' Onions. These are like cloying old songs that once\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1247,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2009\/05\/weve-met-the-enemy-so-what\/","url_meta":{"origin":1301,"position":4},"title":"We’ve Met the Enemy. So What?","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"May 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock The Internet is not killing the newspaper. The economy is. This would be obvious as it's stated in every halfway decent article on the print media, but the copy usually includes comments by people who seem to throw their hands out and cry, \"Ach, die\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":79,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2004\/06\/bargaining-universal\/","url_meta":{"origin":1301,"position":5},"title":"Bargaining universal","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"June 10, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock Thursday, June 10, 2004. The small business community continues to make itself extinct. It's so easy to hit Wal-Mart as it's such a big target (pun intended) but it's what we truly want. Bargaining is a basic human need as food and sex, if you\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "American Culture"","block_context":{"text":"American Culture","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/american-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1325,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions\/1325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}