GEORGE - English 9



THIS AMERICAN IS HUNGRY...

by Dale Maharidge

...And So Is One out of Every Five Kids in the Country--Three-Quarters of Them Children of the Working Poor.

Heidi enters her aunt's trailer, carefully stepping over a gaping hole in the rotting floor. She stands, trembling, clutching this letter, written at the suggestion of Miss Genevieve, her favorite teacher, to send to George W. Bush or Al Gore, depending on who wins next month.

"I need to fix the spelling," she says shyly. But she needs help. Miss Genevieve recently committed suicide. Heidi's eyes are dark-set--she'd spent the night tending to her ailing 88-year-old grandmother, carrying her back and forth to the toilet.

The single-wide trailer is set in a thickness of woods slashed by a road that grapevines off Cumberland Mountain in eastern Tennessee. There are no roadside rails; crosses tacked to bark-skinned trees memorialize those lost to the curves. Each day, Heidi's common-law father drives the road for two hours to reach his job as a mechanic in Knoxville, and then another two hours to return home.

Heidi's family is working but poor. America has never been richer, but these good times for many mask a crisis for others. In an election year that follows nearly a decade of unparalleled economic expansion, there are 13.5 million American children living in poverty, according to the Children's Defense Fund. One out of every five kids. And 74 percent of their parents work--they don't take welfare. Many hold down two or even three jobs, but the wages aren't enough to bring their children out of poverty or protect them from hunger.

Photographer Michael Williamson and I documented this national disgrace for GEORGE as we drove more than 6,000 miles, from Washington, D.C., to Tennessee and Texas and back, visiting some of these 13.5 million poor children, including those minutes from where both Al Gore and George W. Bush live and work.

For Michael and me, the journey actually dates back to 1980, when we began reporting on poverty. We spent 10 years riding freight trains and interviewing homeless job seekers, and produced three books, including AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM, which won the 1990 Pulitzer prize for nonfiction. But nothing prepared us for what we witnessed on our recent road trip into the backyards of the two major-party candidates. There, we found working people as desperate as the homeless we had met in the 1980s.

Here's what we discovered in these times of plenty:

- Perversely, the booming economy has actually hurt America's invisible poor by causing rents to skyrocket. A Housing and Urban Development study found that a record 5.4 million households put half or more of their income toward rent or live in "severely distressed housing." Some parents fork over every penny they make at a job for rent alone. Preliminary figures from a new report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition show that, in Nashville, workers must earn $12.33 per hour to afford a two-bedroom unit; $15.75 in Austin; and $28.06 in San Francisco, the nation's most expensive housing market. The federal minimum wage is $5.15.

- Often, food is not bought so rent can be paid. Working families go hungry, despite heroic distribution by America's Second Harvest, the nation's leading food-bank network. In 1990, it gave out 476 million pounds of food. In 1999, that more than doubled to 1 billion pounds. Yet this charity by the ton hasn't kept up with the increasing demand; many needy working families now receive only a single bag of food each month, enough for a few days. Others get nothing because food runs out--Second Harvest in Knoxville, Tennessee, for instance, says it is forced to turn away 41 percent of its clients.

- Even steady work at twice the minimum wage often isn't sufficient. For example, Maggie Segura makes $10 an hour as a Texas state employee. Yet this single mother of an ailing two-year-old girl comes up short each month, even though she built her own Habitat for Humanity home to cut housing costs, and budgets tightly.

- Still, pride abounds. One woman in Tennessee was so ashamed of her near-empty refrigerator that when she offered us iced tea she barely opened the door and shielded the mostly bare chamber from view. When we asked the working poor whether their kids go hungry, they seldom admitted it directly.

- Hunger is not restricted to ghettos, shacks, and trailers. We found hunger in suburban and country houses with a middle-class look that disguises the despair inside. Child poverty in 2000 is not distended bellies. Still, children go hungry--and have pain in their stomachs where food ought to be.

- Welfare reform has obscured our basic poverty problem, not cured it. At welfare's peak, in the 1990s, 5.5 percent of Americans were enrolled. Now, four years after the 1996 reforms, 2.4 percent are enrolled. But the fact is, the bulk of the poor have always worked. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a family of four with two children under 18 must earn more than $16,954 annually to stay above the national poverty line.

I wanted to ask George W. Bush and Al Gore about these issues, but my interview requests were declined. It took months of wrangling to get even lower-level spokespeople to talk. Child poverty is not something either side is eager to discuss--or to see. Michael and I went where Bush and Gore likely will not.

NEW DESPERATION IN APPALACHIA

The great upswelling of the Appalachians lifts toward the Smoky Mountains as the highway leads into eastern Tennessee. A blue mist hangs over the Smokies as we follow Bobby and Sudie Grubbs's old car up a mountain road, to a trailer park, in the town of Pigeon Forge. They've been raising their grandchildren--Cody, eight, and Sebastian, six--there since birth.

Sudie works at a Wendy's on the tourist strip 30 hours a week. She'd like to go full-time, but management won't let her. Part-timers like her aren't eligible for benefits. Thus the limited hours. Because she was just laid off from a second part-time minimum-wage job, Sudie's weekly gross is now down to $210.

Sudie is among 4.7 million other American part-time workers who desire full-time jobs, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.

Bobby, who is debilitated by a stroke and diabetes, is retired. He lost his job as a social worker during a downsizing in 1990, when he was in his 50s. He then worked part-time at a fast-food joint until he could no longer keep up physically.

"We're back to poverty level," Bobby says.

Sudie says the family gets $63 a month in food stamps--a bit over $15 for each of them. This falls far short of their needs. Often, they get mysteriously cut off; she says the application process is miserable.

"I don't like to do it," Sudie says of receiving charity. "It makes me feel funny."

Bobby cuts in, "I'm not going to let these boys go hungry."

Sometimes, dinner is simply baked potatoes, but "I know there are more families out there that are worse off," Sudie says.

It's rough raising the boys. Their mother couldn't take care of them; Sudie doesn't want to go into the reasons. The problems seem profound. Cody is a troubled child. He runs at the sight of open space. "I don't know why," Sudie says. Whatever the reason, the boy runs for hours, through the woods, as the police try to find him and bring him home.

As we leave, we hear the trailer door latch snap shut to prevent the boy from racing off.

At Sevier County Food Ministries in Pigeon Forge, administrator Steve Streibig says he's seen a huge influx of working-poor families moving to the Smokies--a new migrant class fleeing the cities. But they soon find that housing is a major problem. Even in rural Tennessee, rents are relatively high--$500 and $600 per month is common. "They pitch tents everywhere," Streibig says. "It's like the Old West."

In the nearby town of Newport, Pastor Thomas Cutshaw of Gentle Touch Ministries says his organization helps an average of 175 families a month with food and other necessities. "Compared to 15 years ago, conditions are worse," Cutshaw says. "A man was paid for a day's work. What you have is them bringing down wages. But prices keep going up. The worst thing to see is the children. We had a little girl come in, all dirty knees, and we gave her a Barbie doll. You're talking about a girl who got an apple and an orange in her stocking for Christmas. That's hard. It makes you cry."

FROM $14 PER HOUR TO $5.15

We leave the mountain country and drive into middle Tennessee, past slack reservoirs that once were the mighty Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. The Tennessee Valley Authority's dams helped lift this region out of the poverty of the Great Depression, luring factories with the promise of cheap electricity and a willing labor force.

In 1953, the Oshkosh B'Gosh Company opened a plant in Celina that eventually employed 1,200. This "new economy" of a half century ago changed the face of the region. People bought nice homes. Kids went to college.

Then four years ago, Oshkosh shut down. The company's clothes manufacturing was sent to factories in Mexico and Honduras. One of those left jobless was Elizabeth Boles, 55.

Last fall, at a journalists' convention, Al Gore, who supported free trade through NAFTA, boasted about America's new economy. "I'm proud of what we've achieved," he said. Thanks to the policies of Clinton and Gore, he added, "we now have nearly 19 million new jobs."

Elizabeth Boles landed one of those jobs at a new Rite Aid drugstore. Her salary on Oshkosh piecework in the old manufacturing economy: up to $14 an hour. In the service economy: $5.15, the minimum wage.

Whether the overall effect of NAFTA has helped or hurt American workers can be debated. But it certainly harmed Boles, and 10,000 other Tennessee workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

A single mother, Boles is somehow raising her son, Dusty, 12, alone. She's lucky to have her house, which she bought and paid for with her old salary. It's a fine little house, set in a wooded lot. A passerby would never suspect her hardship.

"You make $10 or more an hour, then you drop to $5.15..." she says. She does not wave her arms in anger. Her demeanor is one of defeat.

"People in Washington look at the papers and see you're working," Elizabeth finally says softly. "On paper, you're working. I don't have stock. Or a bank account. I'm just surviving.

"People aren't starving. But they are going to bed without all they should be eating," she says. "Dusty and I are not big eaters."

Her 1992 Honda Accord has 120,000 miles, and she lives in fear of it dying. A car payment would spell disaster. She even has trouble buying school clothes. I ask about food stamps. She wrinkles her nose. No way.

"Too proud, I guess."

GOING BANKRUPT FOR THE CHILDREN

Before leaving this small town on the Cumberland River, we meet another former Oshkosh employee now working in the service economy. Throughout the interview, she kneads a fold in her pants. "I haven't talked about this," she says, and then asks me not to use her name because she's embarrassed.

She proudly says she made two times the daily production quota at Oshkosh: "I worked 54 to 60 hours a week. I was late for work one time in 14 years. It snowed, a big snow."

She has two daughters--one college-bound, but the younger one "works hard to just get Cs and Ds," she says. With the textile plants gone, this daughter seems doomed to a low-wage life. "I wonder if I'll be able to take care of her," she says, on the verge of tears. She apologizes. She stares at the fold in her pants.

She and her husband use credit cards. They use them too much; they're now $40,000 in debt. This seems not so smart, but they made the decision to maintain their life for the kids. Her choice is to get her daughters up and out into the world, and pay the consequences later. They are willing to go bankrupt--and to work until they die.

LIVING A NIGHTMARE WITH NO HEALTH INSURANCE

Leaving the underemployed women of Celina, we follow the Cumberland downriver, toward Carthage, where Al Gore spent summers on his father's 225-acre tobacco and cattle farm. These days, when Gore's motorcade rolls into Carthage, en route to his 2,100-square-foot brick house on a hill outside of town, he passes not very far from where George Harris spends his days. Harris sits on a porch, staring at the gum trees in front of the 1968-vintage public-housing project, an amalgam of 38 duplexes, where he lives with his wife, Lou, and their 11-year-old son, Michael.

Michael stands at the door, looking through the screen at his father. He watches with the gray eyes of a life-worn adult as Harris says flatly that he's waiting to die any day now of a stroke, at age 57. He's had a few, and can't work any longer. The next one will kill him.

"I'm sitting here waiting for an aneurysm," Harris says. "They said if they operate, it will kill me. And if they don't operate, it will kill me. In these two buildings, there have been three deaths in the last few months. I feel like I'm on death row."

Forty-four million Americans lack health insurance. Harris didn't have any when he had a heart attack in the early 1990s, or later, when he suffered his series of strokes. As a consequence, he had to lose everything to qualify for the state medical insurance program for the poor. He had to become Medicaid-eligible, which meant divesting assets. The laborer sold off many of his tools, worth thousands of dollars, for a fraction of their value. If there had been national health care, Harris and his wife and son would not have had to sink this low.

Harris had labored hard at many jobs, including one of his last: working on the Gore family farm back in 1989.

"They only paid $5 an hour," he says, "and I needed to make $500 a week. I said I'd go to work if I could put in enough hours to make that."

Harris doesn't feel he was underpaid for his carpentry and odd jobs, though he didn't get benefits and always worked 80 to 100 hours a week. The elder Mrs. Gore, he says, was not happy with what he earned: "My, she complained about it every week. But he [Al Sr.] had plenty for me to do."

Harris talks of the job fondly, telling of the time he whacked the senior Gore with a shovel. Two show bulls had gotten into a fight, and Harris was worried that the $20,000 animals would be harmed, so he leaped into the fracas, swinging a shovel between the beasts--and he accidentally struck the elder Gore. He crumpled to his knees, but was not seriously injured. Al Jr. was there that day--he came running when the bulls, continuing their fight, smashed through a wall.

Harris smiles warmly, remembering. He likes the younger Gore. "I'm going to vote for him," he says. "I'm proud of him and proud of what he's doing."

His wife, Lou, is also ill. They get by on a little over $9,000 a year, mostly from disability benefits. But he really wishes he could work again: "They got me now. I can't go out and make a dollar. I hope you never have to be broke."

Does his family ever go hungry?

He doesn't answer. Instead, he talks about God.

"I'm a born-again Christian," Harris says. "God promises you that if you serve him, that you will not go hungry. I've got nothing but fun stories to tell. I'm not going to put anyone down. God says I'd be sinning if I did."

Almost a month later, when we return, Harris is again sitting on the porch. That evening his family will have cabbage and bread for dinner. We talk about Michael, who again comes to the screen door briefly and then retreats to his room.

"He hasn't had much of a childhood," Harris says. "He's 11, and he's acting like an adult. He stays back there in that room. He keeps quiet and does his art."

George and Lou Harris want their son to excel, but feel helpless. "We can't afford a computer," Lou says. "The teachers tell him to print things out on a computer. He wants to go to art school and college and try to further that."

Harris shakes his head: "There's no way I can college-educate him."

He also takes full responsibility for his situation. He says he is being punished with strokes for working too hard. "I blame only myself," he says. "They told me to slow down. I worked all those hours. Now I'm paying for my mistakes at 57."

HUNGER IN TEXAS

Austin, the state capital, rises out of the Texas plains at the edge of hill country. The city is no longer a hip redneck backwater bohemia--it's now known as Silicon Hills. The $116-billion company Dell Computers, for instance, is based here.

But the city is also bisected, as if by a knife, by Interstate 35. To the west, there is money. To the east, in the flatlands, are the people who do the little jobs.

Texas breeds the working poor. The state is so parsimonious with social services and education that it ranks dreadfully by just about every measure of poverty. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ranks it second from the bottom in terms of people going hungry. Their study, released last fall, says around 13 percent of Texas households were "food insecure," meaning they didn't have "enough food to fully meet basic needs at all times."

In response to a reporter's question about the findings, George W. Bush said, "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where? You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas."

I'm curious about that comment. So I take a walk. Ten minutes by foot from the governor's office I find Caritas, a soup kitchen. Inside, I see Paula, 24, with her four hungry children, aged 19 months to five years, eating meatballs and thin soup.

A critic could say that Paula made bad choices in her life--having so many kids and then separating from her husband even though she was unskilled and not likely to land a good job. Perhaps. But fact is, her four young kids, who made no choices, now go hungry.

Then I get in a car and head to the Montopolis Community Center in east Austin, three crow-flying miles from the statehouse. Here I see 200 people waiting in line for a truck that's bringing food from the Capital Area Food Bank, a 51,000-square-foot facility where volunteers and staffers gave out 8 million pounds of food in 1999. They project they'll distribute 10.5 million pounds this year.

The people in line are watching workers unload a truck bulging with bread, tomatoes, and other vegetables. This isn't your homeless I-see-Jesus-in-a-mud-puddle crowd. These are the working poor. One man is a janitor. Another works in a cafeteria. Nearly everyone is employed. Many have children in tow. An older woman who works in a tortilla factory picks through corn while her daughter and the daughter's three-month-old baby wait nearby. "Our rent is $675," says the daughter. Sometimes, after the rent is paid, "there's no food in the house," she says, as though it's a common fact of life--which, to her, it is.

A BUSH WORKER DOING EVERYTHING RIGHT

At the end of the line I meet Maggie Segura, 24, who is on lunch break from her full-time job for the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services. George W. Bush is her ultimate boss. And she's struggling; she has no money left for food.

Segura's two-year-old daughter, Mary Francis, was born with medical problems, and almost died twice on the operating table. Segura had to leave work without pay for over a month during her daughter's hospital stay earlier this year, and she hasn't caught up yet.

"I'm paying for it now," she says as she puts tomatoes in her box. "I have all my bills paid, except there was no money left over for groceries. Food is like the last thing I buy."

Bush doesn't know Segura. But his wife, Laura, should be aware of her. Last year, Laura was invited to join governors' wives across the country in "First Ladies Build," a Habitat for Humanity project to spotlight women who help other women construct homes; Maggie Segura's house was one of them.

The plan was that each first lady would go to a Habitat house in her state. Segura's house was picked for Texas, and Laura Bush was invited to come hammer a few nails--and maybe speak a few inspiring words about this sort of volunteerism, which her husband is promoting as an alternative to government action.

Segura hoped to talk to Laura as they hammered; she imagined telling her about the hard times state employees have. One employee survey in 1998 found that 240 secretaries, janitors, and food-service workers at the University of Texas in Austin were on food stamps.

But Laura never showed up.

Segura says that an aide told her Laura would visit Segura's Habitat home sometime in the future. Segura is still waiting.

A Habitat spokesperson in Austin says that Laura Bush was gearing up for her husband's campaign and simply got too busy to attend. Nationwide, only two governors' wives--Bush and Alice Foster of Louisiana--did not appear at houses, says Fiona Eastwood of Habitat.

I visit Segura at her house, one of 24 Habitat homes on a cul-de-sac. Segura says 17 of these 1,000-square-foot tin-roofed homes are owned by single mothers.

One of her walls is decorated with a signed picture of the builders--40 workers, all women. Otherwise, the walls are mostly bare. Segura earns $10 an hour, nearly twice the minimum wage, yet it's still not enough to meet her monthly budget. She rapidly runs through her expenses: mortgage ($312); car payment ($298); Pampers ($150); furniture payment ($100); car insurance ($80); food ($80); health insurance ($70); food for grandmother, who provides day care ($70); gasoline for car ($60); electricity ($50); book club for daughter's reading ($30); phone ($20); natural gas ($20); one coloring book per month ($10).

EXPENSES: $1,350

TAKE-HOME PAY: $1,240

MONTHLY BALANCE:-$110

Segura's list does not include incidentals such as toilet paper, soap, and toothpaste. Nor does it cover medical co-payments. Last month, when her allergies flared, she spent $20 in co-payments for prescriptions, plus another $36 for a drug not covered. Worse, her state health insurance co-payments for some drugs will double next year.

"We don't buy new clothes," she says. "I go to the thrift store."

Her great fortune is the Habitat house, with its abnormally low mortgage. "Without Habitat, I'd have to live with my mother," she says. Segura, who covets her independence, worked hard building other Habitat houses to earn enough hours to qualify for her own home.

One month after first meeting Segura, I see her in the food line again, even though she has taken a second job, as a waitress at night, pushing her into a 50-plus-hour workweek.

A HOUSE WITHOUT RUNNING WATER

We visit Laredo, on the Mexican border, and go to the "colonias," the impoverished, dirt-road border tracts. There we find Josefina Rodriguez. While NAFTA has hurt Elizabeth Boles in Tennessee, it has helped Rodriguez--she has an office job at an import firm where she earns $10 an hour. But there's a catch: She and her family could still only afford to buy a house that lacks running water. All water must be hauled in barrels.

Texas is an endless blur of struggling workers.

THE DESOLATION OF AMERICA'S NEW POVERTY

When photographer Michael Williamson and I documented child poverty here and abroad in the 1980s, we saw obvious poverty. What has been troubling me on this assignment, traveling from Tennessee to Texas and back again, is this: The desperation of the American working poor in the year 2000 is nearly invisible. A photo of a dirty child standing in front of a homeless shanty captures the horror of that child's situation. But a picture of a contemporary poor child outside of a suburban house--well, the child looks middle-class. Yet pastel-colored hunger clearly exists.

In Dove Springs, five miles from downtown Austin, there's a mix of houses and apartments that once belonged to personnel from Bergstrom Air Force base. The base closed in 1994. The poor moved in.

By day, the neighborhood looks like most any suburb. Behind the walls, however, some apartment units hold three families. Many are headed by janitors, laborers, cooks.

The River City Youth Foundation, an after-school program for impoverished six- to 10-year-old kids, is located in what had been the community clubhouse. "We did a study of low-income housing," executive director Mona Gonzalez says, "and of the 400 units in this immediate area, 90 percent are headed by single females. Last summer, when they weren't in school to get lunch there, I had kids coming to my door begging for food." It's not that the kids are dying, but it's hunger nonetheless. "There's a pain in your belly," she says. "You can't think about anything else."

It's as if the kids' batteries are charged at only 70 percent capacity. They function, but weakly.

Low wages force their parents to work stunning hours, which means these kids grow up not only lacking enough proper food, but deprived of something deeper, consistent family support. Even though they live in what appears to be a suburb, they grow up in some ways more bereft of emotional wealth than many Third World children. They don't have distended bellies caused by poverty. But too many have emotionally distended souls.

PARKING THE WORKING HOMELESS

The road winds east, through Texas and into the thickening woods of Arkansas. Michael and I keep heading north. A night of driving brings us back to the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Here, according to preliminary data by the Low Income Housing Coalition--an advocacy organization for affordable housing--a worker needs $16.60 an hour, 40 hours a week, to afford a two-bedroom rental, which costs between $850 and $900. Using the benchmark goal of 30 percent of one's income spent on housing, that means an annual gross salary of $34,528 is needed to pay rent and afford food and other necessities.

"The housing crisis here is extremely severe," says Sczerina Perot, of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. "There's a six-month waiting list for an emergency shelter."

In Virginia's Fairfax County, one of the country's richest counties, with a median household income of $87,596, the nonprofit New Hope Housing runs three shelters. Executive Director Pamela Michell says a survey early this year identified 2,013 homeless people in the county: 442 were parents, 830 were children. Yet 64 percent of the adults had jobs.

Why are there working homeless? Not only because rent increases have outstripped wages, but because federal Section 8 housing vouchers, which once ensured a family a place to live, have lost their power. It pays up to 30 percent of the rent, and, says Michell: "It used to be if you had a Section 8 voucher, it was gold. Ten years ago, there were places begging you to rent." Now, landlords don't want to deal with government red tape, or have poor people in their complexes. So, Michell says, "People live in their cars."

BLEEDING FOR HIS CHILDREN

There's a strong Calvinist attitude toward the working poor in America. It transcends party lines. Many middle- and upper-class Americans cannot comprehend how someone can work and still not have food. Over the years, I've encountered extreme reactions to my stories about the poor. Readers will call and blame the poor: They made bad choices. They are stupid. They shouldn't have children. And so on.

I wish they could sit down with some of the people we met on this trip, people like Obie Butler, a janitor in Austin who literally bleeds to feed his daughters. Butler doesn't want a government subsidy. No something for nothing. Just a living wage.

I remember standing in his backyard with him one evening, watching his three daughters--Rejeannee, 10; Reyna, eight; Sherene, six--dancing in a circle. He's a big man, some 300 pounds, a former boxer. At night he cleans a hospital. The staff calls him "Dr. Dirt."

His work ethic was shaped in the army. "The old soldier, you do what you got to do," he says. "You get up off your ass, do whatever you have to do to get the job done." So after working all night at the hospital, he sometimes picks up a spot labor job and works through the day without sleeping. Or he sells blood plasma for $18 to $21 a pint when times are tough. Luckily, with the help of the food bank, he hasn't had to sell his blood in a few months.

As the girls play, I notice a bird on a wire with a crippled wing. Butler has seen the bird, too, for weeks. I marvel, asking, "How does it survive?"

"Desire," he says.

Later, as we walk over to the girls, Butler compares America in the year 2000 to a shoe. "Without the sole of the shoe, you can't have the top of the shoe," he says. He and workers like him are the sole of the shoe you don't often see. He wants politicians to "think of the soles, the soles who pay them taxes, the vets working two and three jobs, the working soles who have no time for their families.

"Think about us. We're here."

* * *

There are 13.5 million American children living in poverty. Among industrialized nations, the U.S. ranks a shameful sixteenth in efforts to lift children out of poverty.

1 in 4 kids was born poor.

1 in 5 kids is poor now.

Texas and Tennessee rank near the bottom in the Children's Rights Council's rankings of the best states in which to raise a child. Texas is forty-eighth, Tennessee thirty-eighth. Washington, D.C., is fifty-first.

Every 40 seconds, a baby is born into poverty.

In Nashville, a worker earning the federal minimum of $5.15 an hour must work 94 hours per week to pay the rent on a two-bedroom unit. In Austin, Texas, it's 104 hours.

1 in 12 kids lives at less than half the poverty level.

A full 10.9 percent of the households in Tennessee and 12.9 percent of those in Texas lack sufficient food, according to a study by the Department of Agriculture.

Every 56 seconds, a baby is born without health insurance.

One in three American children will be poor at some point in childhood; one in three never graduates from high school; one in 910 will be killed by guns before age 20.

* * *

Sources for the statistics cited above: Children's Defense Fund, Children's Rights Council, National Low Income Housing Coalition, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

GEORGE

Oct. 2000, pp. 106+

Copyright (c) George. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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"Dear Future President,

The familys of Tennessee and I would like our state to have more food banks and more places we can go to when things get hard. I thank it would help if you donated so much money each year to help familys that can't afored food. In my 12 years on earth my mother has had to strech our mills to make them last longer. There are many people that arn't that lucky. Some people are disable or have broken bones. It would help all the familys in Tennesse.

Sincerly

Heidi Emery"

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