No one in the U.S. should have to do without the basics

MY HOME isn’t the best at keeping out outdoor temps. Yet even as I try to coax peak performance from its HVAC system in the worst of winter and summer, I remember people throughout my city who live in tents or have no shelter whatsoever.

I kick in my widow’s mite with every paycheck. It does only a little to assuage my awareness of how much more I could do. Yet the United States has the wealth to ensure the basics of Maslow’s Hierarchy for everyone within its borders. I would gladly pay the trifling tax increase to cover the cost. Better yet, the U.S. could cover the cost with no increase at all by building fewer bombers, subsidizing fewer oil companies, or loopholing fewer obscenely rich people out of paying their fair share.

Either way, it is immoral that anyone should go without shelter, food, and medical care in this land of excess.

“I don’t want to feed and shelter drug dealers,” one person argued. I get it. Trouble is, carving out even one exception opens the door to more exceptions. As recent history makes clear, it wouldn’t be long before proudly Christian politicians moved to exclude swaths of people they deemed unsavory, such as addicts, the LGBTQ+ community, undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants from the “wrong countries,” people who “need tough love not enabling,” members of the “wrong religion,” people who “just don’t want to work,” and more. I would rather risk feeding the scum of the earth, even in perpetuity, than trust anyone with deciding who does and who doesn’t get to eat or keep warm.

No one in this country should have to do without shelter, food, and medical care. No one.

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