My loyal reader may have read my blog from yesterday where I felt the need to defend food banks in the face of ignorance and stupidity about what we do, why we do it and the people we help. Lazy and wildly inaccurate evidence free assertions that somehow the reason people use food banks is that they are feckless, irresponsible and have skewed priorities. You may have noticed how angry I was to write such a piece. Controlled anger, for sure, but anger nonetheless. An afternoon at the Melchester food bank always brings me back to earth and so it did today.
Today we saw people who were at the end of their tether. Obviously, I cannot go into precise detail but seeing someone from one of Bristol’s more upmarket areas, a working lone parent who has a severely disabled child, who had suddenly and unexpectedly run out of money and food was profoundly distressing. I am old and grizzled enough not to show distress, but frankly I’d be deeply ashamed of myself if I wasn’t moved in some way or other. Then a young pregnant woman who had separated from her partner and now her employer had dropped her like a stone when she told them she was pregnant, leaving her single, pregnant and penniless (and yes I did signpost her with information about what she could do). Add to that, people with major health conditions, recovering from major surgery, who again had nothing due to circumstances beyond their control. Teardrops galore.
This was the real world of a food bank, not the sick, wildly imagined world of the cynics and heartless, where being in poverty just has to be their fault. Sure, people do visit us after making major mistakes and poor decisions, but even then, who hasn’t? In truth, we’re at, or near, the end of the line.
I wonder if some of the brainless critics of foodbanks realise that they are one stroke, one heart attack, one cancer diagnosis away from living an entirely different lifestyle to the one they now enjoy? Because these are just some of the things that can change a life from being what we might call normal to unmanageable. Suddenly, that decent income melts away and people realise that all those tales in the gutter press about generous benefit rates were just tall tales, lies if you will.
Life, as we can tell from the ever increasing numbers of people who are coming to see us, is getting harder and, as I say almost every week, there are people coming to see us who never dreamed they might one day need to use a food bank. Food banks were for other people, even poorer people, but not them. Yet in the blink of an eye, life can be turned on its head. This is what happened to most of the people I saw today.
Stupid people shouldn’t make me angry, I suppose, but when they say things that are so obviously and demonstrably untrue, as well as misrepresenting the lives of people they will never know or understand, I need to kick back. They insult people without enough to eat and insult the people who volunteer their services who try to help them.
