A friend made the following, very perceptive, comment the other day, and it serves as the inspiration for this post.
How did we get to the place that we are in today? It's a long story, and one that begins in the UK with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Thatcher was the first of the "Neo-Conservative" heads of state that swept the world during the 1980s and 1990s.
The emergence of the modern day food bank coincides with the rise of this new breed of right-wing conservatism in our political discourse and the global recession of the early 1980s. Calgary's Interfaith Foodbank marks their beginnings as being in 1982 at the height of the recession. This, in my opinion not just mere coincidence, but an important confluence of events.
Thatcher all but dismantled labour unions in the UK, and in the United States her close friend and ally Ronald Reagan went after social programs including education.
What is wrong with us/our governments that we either cannot or will not address the systemic issues that force so many people to rely on food banks? They were supposed to be temporary! Now they are a fixture and needed more than ever. That is a systemic societal failure.On the whole, there is an underlying point to this comment that I want to address in the context of today's political environment, because it is our politics which I see as central to this issue.
How did we get to the place that we are in today? It's a long story, and one that begins in the UK with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Thatcher was the first of the "Neo-Conservative" heads of state that swept the world during the 1980s and 1990s.
The emergence of the modern day food bank coincides with the rise of this new breed of right-wing conservatism in our political discourse and the global recession of the early 1980s. Calgary's Interfaith Foodbank marks their beginnings as being in 1982 at the height of the recession. This, in my opinion not just mere coincidence, but an important confluence of events.
Thatcher all but dismantled labour unions in the UK, and in the United States her close friend and ally Ronald Reagan went after social programs including education.
Further following his less-government intervention views, Reagan cut the budgets of non-military[153] programs[154] includingMedicaid, food stamps, federal education programs[153] and the EPA.[155] While he protected entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare,[156] his administration attempted to purge many people with disabilities from the Social Security disability rolls.
