We're all just one misstep away from becoming 'gleaners'

For years I have seen them — the men and women in my neighborhood pushing hand carts, and the occasional shopping cart, loaded with cans and bottles. They are discreet, and I don’t see them often, but they appear when our blue bins are brought to the curb on recycling day; and on warm summer nights, I sometimes hear the rustling of paper bags or the clinking of bottles as they pick through the barrels behind our building.

Are they homeless? Perhaps they have homes but are teetering between hunger and a meal, between keeping tattered clothes and buying a used coat at the thrift store. Maybe the extra income goes toward some meager comfort or a rare luxury. I don’t know, but I was startled one afternoon when I brought my bags of cardboard and plastic out back and found a short, elderly woman who could have been someone’s grandmother, wearing a plaid jacket, poking a stick in the recycling bins and pulling out aluminum cans. She ignored me — or tried to maintain her dignity; however, I couldn’t ignore her as I was jolted from my comfort and obliviousness.

My wife and two daughters drink lots of seltzer, four cases or more a week, depending on the heat and the season. We habitually tossed all the empties in the recycling, but after that encounter, I started saving the 40 or 50 cans and now set them out in a box on Saturday mornings. By the afternoon, the cans are gone and the box has been placed by my basement door for me to reuse. Though I haven’t seen her again, I know the grandmotherly woman in the plaid jacket has come by. Over the last year, we have developed a silent communication, and I hope to have eased her efforts in some small way.

Like politics, all economic insecurity is local.

But I am also angry. We live in the most prosperous country in the world and too many go hungry. It is a cliché, but on Wednesday mornings, the cliché is apparent as I walk past the nearby church. People with hand carts gather on the sidewalk and wait for the food pantry (open just once a week) to distribute bread, dried pasta, coffee and canned goods. With the weather turning cooler, and soon colder, the need becomes more urgent and my neighbors will have no choice but to don coats and shiver while they stand.

Like politics, all economic insecurity is local. By the Brookline Village T stop, a community refrigerator sits in an open cubby, maintained by the shop next door. Anyone can leave food or take food. More and more, community refrigerators are popping up where there is a need; even so, politics — or policies — of a certain bent are vital for making a difference. One of the results of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, one response to the pandemic, was an expansion of the child tax credit, which increased the benefit to a maximum of $3,600 from $2,000 per child 5 years old or younger, and $3,000 for children 6 to 17.

Furthermore, the expansion closed a hole that prevented one-third of the country’s children from receiving full benefits because their families earned too little income. During the time payments were disbursed, monthly from July through December 2021, these child tax credits reduced food insufficiency among families by 26% and kept 3.7 million children out of poverty.

Unfortunately, the payments have ended and child poverty has increased as a result. Yes, the expanded child tax credit cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $225 billion, but I would gladly trim a fraction of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which increased the debt and the deficit, to pay for its renewal.

[W]e are all one accident, one medical disaster, one economic downturn from being gleaners ourselves.

The Republican party’s attitude toward those in need reminds me of "The Gleaners," (1857), painted by Jean-Francois Millet, depicting three peasant women bent over in a field, picking leftover grain after the harvest. Despite Millet's portrayal of the dignity of human labor, "The Gleaners" stoked opposition from the upper classes, which saw a protest about 19th-century trickle-down economics and the plight of rural workers. Perhaps they feared a subliminal call to the lowest rungs of society, for one critic noted the painting had “the thorn of revolution and the guillotine of 1793.”

While many extol an American meritocracy, believing someone is rich because of their talents and poor because of their faults, an MIT study has shown the wealthiest are not the most talented — they are simply the luckiest. In other words, there but for the grace of God go I. It is fitting, then, that we should be confronted with food pantries and community refrigerators — reminders of the vicissitudes of life, that we are all one accident, one medical disaster, one economic downturn from being gleaners ourselves.

So this last weekend, after setting out aluminum cans for the woman in the plaid jacket, I was humbled and touched when I returned later and found a chocolate bar at the bottom of the box.

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