December 23, 2009
Wednesday

This piece was named a Best of Holidailies! Thank you, readers!

It is Festivus, the Seinfeld-created “holiday for the rest of us” and its airing of grievances that can provide a bit of silliness among all the earnest good will of this season. On the bus to Washington last week I gave some thought to which grievance I’d like to air, and couldn’t think of any in my lovely, fortunate, blessed life worth mentioning. But as luck, or fate, or Druidic tree worshippers who think Christians have stolen their holiday would have it, something arrived that got my dander up and gave me, if not a grievance to air, at least a lecture to deliver.

Like many people these days, I use e-mail to keep in touch with people I know but seldom see, as well as people I’ve never met. I also subscribe to a number of discussion lists of a professional nature, such as Emily Dickinson scholarship, concerns of freelance editors and others who work with language, opportunities for and concerns of creative writers. I read blogs, I’m on Facebook, I even Twitter, sometimes. I can get as many as 100 e-mails a day, many of them interesting, some of them funny, some of them ignorable.

Of the least interest are the jokes and rants and viral videos not of your correspondent’s authorship that seem to get forwarded endlessly, the way people used to photocopy stuff until the material was so pixilated and littered with bits of stray carbon that it was unreadable. Only now the succeeding copies get long quote lines that tend to fill up the left margin and make the part you’re supposed to read a narrow column down the middle.

Among my correspondents is the priest who, as my high school Religion IV teacher in 1965, opened my mind and was among the first to encourage me in critical thinking and to give me the intellectual tools to ask questions, discover more, and make informed decisions about the things I read and the information that came my way. I’ve been on his mailing list for many years. He sends along his sermons, commentary on his reading, prayer requests, and the occasional joke, sweet cat picture, or funny story about kids’ efforts to make sense of the world.

Last week, my teacher forwarded to me (and presumably the rest of his contacts as well), a “joke” that appears to have originated (for him) from the pastor of Prince of Peace Parish in nearby Steelton, Pennsylvania. The subject line was “Soup Kitchen – Priceless.”

There followed then a picture of First Lady Michelle Obama working as a server at a communal feeding site. Among the people lined up to receive a dollop of the mushroom risotto (per the sign beside the window) is a man in a black watch cap and sweatshirt seen from behind who is apparently taking Mrs. Obama’s picture with a handheld electronic device. The message alleges that this represents “a homeless person receiving a government-funded meal while taking a picture of Mrs. Obama while using his $400 Blackberry cell phone.”

I knew instantly that something wasn’t right about this. And it took me just two clicks to get the facts. Try it yourself. Enter into Google the words “Michelle Obama soup kitchen cell phone” (Google will probably anticipate most of what follows after “soup”) and you’ll be able to access the same Snopes.com explanation I did.

But you don’t have to do that right now, because I am going to tell you most of what’s in it. The photo is real, but the information that usually accompanies it (this “joke” is widely circulated and is not original with the local pastor) is grossly inaccurate. The facility where Mrs. Obama is working (in an event that took place last March) is Miriam’s Kitchen, a privately-funded organization. The person shown taking the picture has never been identified. He might be a guest (the term Miriam’s Kitchen uses for the people they serve), or he might be a Miriam’s Kitchen staff person or volunteer, or even a passerby who wants a look at Michelle Obama. The device he is using may or may not be a Blackberry, and instead of its being his own, it might have been given to him by someone else for the purpose of getting the picture.

In any case, a cell phone, even a Blackberry, need not cost hundreds of dollars nor require expensive monthly access fees. Even a cell phone capable of capturing images can be had cheaply. Cell phones are a great boon to homeless people, allowing them to have a contact number when applying for a job and providing a safety net of communication capability in the fragile structure of their world. And a person having a meal at Miriam’s Kitchen might not be homeless, merely jobless, perhaps newly so, with a cell phone contract paid in advance but no funds for food.

If you follow the links you’ll get from your Google search, you might run into some of the many discussions that this photo has given rise to and the many opinions that have been offered about it, most of them based on the erroneous assumptions I have tried to dispel above. The opinions register a disdain for the homeless and the hungry and question the need for programs that offer goods and services. Reading just a few of them leaves me feeling sad and defeated.

It is quite a bold step for a well-brought-up Catholic girl to call out two priests, one of whom she reveres as a great teacher, on their behavior. But that is what I am about to do. To the pastor who sent it originally, I ask, what purpose was in your mind when you made this questionable material available to more people than it had already circulated to? (You should know that I had never seen it before, thus, of all the people I know, some of whom had surely seen it, no one else had deemed it worthy of being given wider circulation.) Is this your feeling about the homeless and the hungry, that they are possibly tricksters who claim poverty and accept handouts while spending money on electronic gadgets? Surely there are among that population people who are scammers and players, but those people exist in all groups. What did you hope to accomplish by calling negative attention to some of the most vulnerable among us? What would the Prince of Peace do?

And to my teacher, what was in your mind as you passed this along? Did you not question the assumptions underlying the interpretation of the photo? Did you not use the very same skills of critical thinking that you taught me to use forty-five years ago? If you did, how could you not have come to the same conclusions I did, that the picture is misinterpreted, perhaps willfully so, and that further circulation of this “joke” serves only to add to the misery in this world instead of mitigate it, as I believe the Prince of Peace would have us do?

I realize that in writing and posting publicly this message, I am perhaps contributing to the further dissemination of a piece of information I have just said does not deserve any more attention. But at least I am making some small effort to undo the damage that has already been done. The hungry and the homeless have a special place in my heart, for reasons I do not fully understand. But then, the way the Prince of Peace calls us to serve is often a mystery. I pray daily for people who suffer this way. I also contribute regularly, if modestly, to my congregation’s ministry to feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. If nothing else, perhaps my anger over your forwarding of this stupid joke will lead me to get more involved. If Mrs. Obama can dish out mushroom risotto, so can I.

I urge you both to reflect on what the Prince of Peace would have us do. Pray for the hungry and the homeless, contribute to their well-being rather than to their continued diminishment as persons, and apply some critical thinking before you forward another tired joke.

 

From the Archives
December 23, 2004 — Please to Put a Penny in the Old Man’s Hat: Today would be the eighty-sixth birthday of Ron’s Aunt Nanny, his mother’s sister. She died in 1998 a few weeks short of her eightieth. My father, who died in 1985, would be eighty-eight on the Feast of Stephen. Because of the distractions and the hoopla of Christmas, both of them got short shrift on their birthdays, seldom a card and even less often a gift.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
To comment or to be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period) OR
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/silkentent