(OPINION) Michael Snyder – In my entire lifetime, there has never been a Thanksgiving like this. 39 million Americans don’t have enough to eat right now, more than 70 million claims for unemployment benefits have been filed so far during this calendar year, and people are waiting in line for hours at food banks all over the nation just for some Thanksgiving handouts.
If you and your family have plenty of turkey to eat, you should be very thankful, because many Americans can no longer even take Thanksgiving dinner for granted these days. On Tuesday, vehicles were lined up for hours in New Jersey as people waited to receive prepackaged Thanksgiving meals at a local food bank…
Video obtained by CNN on Tuesday from the Meadowlands entertainment complex in New Jersey showed residents waiting for several hours to obtain prepackaged boxes of meals for the Thanksgiving holiday. “If it wasn’t for this place, we wouldn’t know where we would get our food,” one distraught woman told CNN of the food bank in East Rutherford, N.J. Of course, we have been seeing similar wait times all over the nation.
At one food bank in Texas, demand for Thanksgiving meals was more than eight times higher than normal…Food bank officials in Dallas, Texas, have also noticed a staggering increase in demand for food assistance. North Texas Food Bank representatives told the Dallas Morning News that they handed out roughly 8,500 meals to local families during a giveaway on Saturday that in years past has seen fewer than 1,000 show up for donations.
You can see a stunning photograph of vehicles lined up for that food distribution event right here. There are a lot of really nice vehicles in that picture. Many of those individuals are probably accustomed to living comfortable middle-class lifestyles, but just like I warned in my new book they are “suddenly” in need of food because this economic downturn has turned their worlds completely upside down.
Yes, there have always been hungry people in America, but what we are witnessing now is hard to fathom. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 12 percent of all Americans did not have enough food to eat between October 28th and November 9th…READ MORE
