War on a Santa Rosa Food Bank

Dear Mr. President,

There’s a food bank in Santa Rosa, California (pop. 170,000) 50 miles north of San Francisco, that’s been handing out free food to people in need for 40 years. They started out in a spare room in a church and 17years ago moved into an abandoned firehouse. The city has let the group—called FISH (Friends In Service Here)—use the firehouse rent-free and paid the utility bills to boot. Since there are no paid staff and no overhead, every penny donated goes to food to give away. Last year FISH gave more than 500,000 pounds of groceries to more than 61,000 people, one third the total population of the town. The unpaid director is an 87 year-old woman who grew up in the Great Depression and whose mother taught her early on that “people with food on the table have a human duty to share with those who don’t.” This is Old America’s values, the moral compassion for, and human duty toward, one’s fellow being. These are not the same American values you praised Dr. Death for—John Brennan, when you nominated him to be the next CIA director. These are not the values of the political class today, Republicans and Democrats alike, not the values of the 1% or the power brokers and lobbyists in Washington, D.C. These are values scorned and ridiculed, subverted and suppressed but they are basic to our nature and essential, for without them a community, a nation and humanity itself cannot survive. This Santa Rosa food pantry has provided a valuable public service to the community for 40 years, Mr. President, the antithesis of kill lists, targeted assassinations and drone wars. They feed the hungry, as Jesus did, they see their fellow being with compassion and they make peace not war. But war has affected the group in an indirect way, for the war and the military budget has sucked vast quantities of money, trillions of dollars over the past decade, out of our economy and Santa Rosa is one of its victims; it cannot afford to make the building conform to new federal regulations and so, FISH has been notified they must evacuate the building this year so the city can sell it. A single Hellfire missile costs in the neighborhood of $60,000. A Predator drone, approximately $5 million. It would take only a tiny fraction of that for Santa Rosa to upgrade the old firehouse and let FISH continue their good works. In the end, all war is local and I keep thinking of that bumper sticker on a friend’s car: How’s the War Economy Workin’ Out For Ya? Not so good in Santa Rosa.