Poverty in America

Time for a Little Thanks

by Diane Nilan

categories: Health & Healthcare, Hunger, Inequality, Jobs & Unemployment, Race, Ethnicity, Class & Gender

Published November 20, 2009 @ 05:08AM PT

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With our national holiday of Thanksgiving rapidly approaching, I'd like to offer some therapeutic thoughts to counteract the ongoing bleak economic reality, including this recent and timely report about people suffering from hunger.

With health care dominating national news, I was delighted to read a positive story about a hospital administrator's approach to coping with their fiscal crisis. The Boston Globe reported that Paul Levy, the hospital CEO, walked around the hospital and made simple, but critical, observations.

He stood at the nurses' stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine.

He noticed the same when he poked his head into the rooms and watched as the people who deliver the food chatted up the patients and their families.

He watched the people who polish the corridors, who strip the sheets, who empty the trash cans, and he realized that a lot of them are immigrants, many of them had second jobs, most of them were just scraping by.

That is quite a refreshing change from the rancor and bitterness toward any number of groups--immigrants, welfare moms, homeless families, people of color, the poor--well, you get the idea. That bitterness, I believe, is one key factor that keeps us from our greatness. Without pretending to offer a panacea for all the world's woes, let me share with you a morsel to consider as you gather for Thanksgiving.

Take one innocuous aspect of your daily life--brushing teeth, fixing sandwiches, traveling to work, squeezing limes, crawling into bed, etc.--and think of elements going into that action. Who made the toothpaste, packaged it, shipped it, put the price tag on it, facilitated your purchase of it? Who planted, harvested, packed, shipped, unpacked, displayed and sold your limes? You get the idea. Think of the little people in your life that you never see, much less think of, who bring you whatever necessities and comforts you might enjoy.

Seems to me focusing on people who really count gives us the respite needed so we can regroup and focus on what's really important, like Sarah Palin's Newsweek cover hoopla.

photos by the author