Are children going to bed hungry and cold each night?

The clerk who files cancelled checks at the bank and has $2.02 in her account; the man who washes cars and does not own one, the woman who copy-edits medical textbooks and has not been to a dentist in a decade, their sons and daughters may be going to bed hungry and cold nightly. In addition, some of these children are malnourished. These are children of working poor families living in Massachusetts.

Before the urban and exurban dwellers thrusted themselves into the activities of the working poor, the working poor’s children ate high protein low fat meat.  They harvested rabbit, pheasant, deer, beaver and other wildlife. They fed their families from hunting, trapping and fishing along with shopping at food markets. The meat was very healthy and it filled the children’s empty bellies, especially, after a long day of school and play.

The working poor have self-respect. They are hard laboring people; yet, welfare programs are not available to them or acceptable to them. Beside feeding their families natural food from wildlife, working poor families used the small income they received from selling the fur of wildlife to purchase home heating oil, gasoline for their motor vehicle, and many other small necessities that any family needs.

In recent years, the Massachusetts Legislators have listen to non-profit organizations with million of dollars in their budgets to stomp on the working Poor’s family lifestyle. For instance, trapping was practiced for years by the working poor of Massachusetts. Until over a million dollars was spent in deceptive advertising by non-profit organization, such as the MSPCA and the Audubon Society, to stop trapping. Today, it is nearly impossible for any working poor family to trap wildlife to help feed and support their families.  
 

It’s difficult to ask legislators, whose children never retire for the night with an empty belly and whose children live in high income urban and exurban communities, such as, Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and cities and towns east of route 495, to understand the needs of the working poor family. However, when the polite society, push a social cause that has a negative effect on lower levels of society, it smacks of social elitism.