Throughstone #3: The Right to Food & A Map We Can Change

Let’s assume our founders didn’t feel the need to state the most self-evident of truths when they provided three key examples of “certain unalienable Rights” most of us could recite before completing elementary school: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. 

The Right to Food is as basic as it gets in terms of meeting human needs. So why state it? Well, as it turns out, apparently the US isn’t fully on board with the concept. No, I’m not talking about the lack of compassion and even downright cruelty we’re seeing among non-leaders in Washington right now, although they are making it clear that the founders perhaps failed in not specifying  the Right to Food along with the Right to Free Speech, to Bear Arms, and a number of other things that are virtually irrelevant if you’re on the brink of starvation. 

Somehow, contemporary America has been unable to reconcile itself with the Right to Food. In the meantime, almost every other country in the world has, in one fashion or another, codified this most fundamental of rights into their legal frameworks. Ironically, it was FDR’s speech in 1941 that introduced “the freedom from want” as one of the founding principles in the UN Charter, but we still can’t proclaim this truth out loud in our legal documents. 

Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to believe the map. 

It’s time to look in the mirror and at the map, America. We’re not acting like the country we thought we were. 

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Read more on the Right to Food and how we didn’t get to where we thought we were here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food_by_country 

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“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-daily reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.

250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku. 

Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.
More free-ranging rambles here, if you’re so inclined: www.freerangeprof.com