The Drive to Care
As the story goes, a student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered to be the first evidence of civilization. Mead is said to have responded not that it was a clay pot, an early tool, or the development of agricultural practices, but rather an ancient skeleton with a broken and healed femur. In the wild, an animal or early hominid with such a debilitating injury would have been abandoned and left to die alone. A healed femur, she elaborated, was evidence that someone or a group had protected this person over a period of time, providing shelter, food, and water and keeping would-be predators away. This selfless care, she is reported to have believed, was the true birth of civilized humanity.
Today, we find ourselves living in times of tremendous fracture. Among the many sudden and debilitating breaks are: hard-working civil servants who are losing their jobs en masse in what appear to be arbitrary firings, tariff wars on multiple fronts that are pushing the prices of food and other essential goods to record highs, and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens who are in limbo waiting to see if the benefits of Social Security, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and many more programs that they rely upon to make ends meet will be drastically cut or perhaps eliminated. In the case of SNAP, that could mean a reduction in benefits; experts predict that the average daily allowance could drop from $6 to $1.40 for Anne Arundel County residents receiving these benefits. At the same time, a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) program providing funding for food banks and schools to procure food from local farms has been canceled, reducing available resources to alleviate food insecurity by one billion dollars. These injuries to our community are setting in motion a rise in food insecurity, not just among the neighbors we have been serving, but also among families who had relative stability until just a few weeks ago. We are suddenly thrust into times of great uncertainty, and many among us are seeking solutions and feeling the strong urge to be of help.
It is our compassion and deeply rooted drive to protect the vulnerable and injured among us that will carry our community through these difficult days of disruption and breakage. Leaning into two of our six core values – compassion, concern for others’ distress/suffering with a desire to relieve that suffering, and accountability, an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility – the AACFB will continue to provide food for the hungry and belonging to the marginalized. It is likely for many that there is a very tough road ahead, but we, along with our coalition of supporters, advocates, and friends will remain steadfast in our efforts to help sustain our neighbors until these fractures heal.
