THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

This was printed in my local paper but it can apply to any place in this once great, now Reaganized country of ours. Send a donation to your local food bank. If you can't afford money or goods, some of your time volunteered would be appreciated.

By Rod Watson

Think of this as my annual Thanksgiving column - four months early.

Like many Americans, I tend to think of the hungry only during the season given over to giving thanks.

But for the 41,000 children who rely on the Food Bank of Western New York each month for enough to eat, summer is no picnic. Once you think about it, it's easy to understand why: They're not getting the free breakfasts and lunches they eat at school during the rest of the year.

Yet roughly 60 percent of the Food Bank's donations come during the holiday season, said Marylou Borowiak, president and CEO.

"During the summer months, there's that void to fill," she said as the agency prepares for "Walk Off Hunger" July 28 in Williamsville's Island Park, its summer fundraiser begun six years ago to try to fill that void.

The fact that we even need to talk about hungry kids in a nation as rich as this is an indictment. So is the reality that, for the most part, we're not talking about them - certainly not in this year's political campaigns.

Like Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," the poor have become invisible Americans, except to people at the Food Bank and the 350 agencies it supplies with food in Erie, Niagara, Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties. The kids can't be invisible when you look into their faces and they pull at your heartstrings.

Stephanie Lawson talks about supplying a cake on what should be every child's special day because without it "these kids wouldn't be able to acknowledge their birthday."

Lawson, the Food Bank's team leader for agency grants and youth programs, describes the BackPack program that sends food home with 600 kids in seven city schools every Friday. Without it, many wouldn't have enough to eat until they returned to school Monday.

In fact, while the Food Bank's support from the state and elsewhere has remained relatively flat, the number of households served jumped by a whopping 18 percent - to 36,207 - last year.

And while the BackPack program operates only in the city, the need extends to the suburbs and rural areas, as evidenced by its four-county distribution area.

"That really breaks down all of those stereotypes," Lawson said. "It's everywhere, and the kids are so thankful."

So are the adults, more and more of whom are employed married couples, despite stereotypes about single mothers. "At more and more of our agencies, you see the working poor," Borowiak said.

These are the people who do the same "work" that Ann Romney does raising a family - but without the Romney resources - while also holding down jobs outside the home. All of which makes the fabricated controversy over the presidential contender's wife sound really silly.

But that's what we're focusing on this year.

Or we're focusing on the beleaguered middle class.

Or we're focusing on millionaires, arguing over the job-creating tax cuts that haven't caused them to create jobs during the last four years, or during the eight years of "certainty" under George W. Bush before that.

The only ones we aren't focusing on are the poor and working poor. They're the forgotten constituency - forgotten during this time of the year and forgotten during this political season.

From the Department of Wishful Thinking, just imagine what we could do if we tithed all the political contributions?