"Treat the public to some butter."

E.D. did not, after all, rise to the occasion.
I'd asked him for food for a coworker who had none. He'd told me that he'd "figure something out", but he came up to me at work yesterday and said, "All we have at the warehouse are tomatoes."

"Oh, no," I said. "Well, I knew we weren't getting food regularly anymore."

"We really aren't," he said. "Just boxes of tomatoes. Maybe if you were Mexican you could do something with them."

Mexican?
In the moment, I was too shocked/confused to respond.
This guy is my age, and as middle-America as they come. What was more white bread in our childhood than tomato soup?
Bring us the tomatoes!
But no.

As it happened, Supershopper Louise brought in baked beans that she'd made from a giant donated bag of dry beans, with glazed carrots on the side (above, right). She squirrels away good things that come her way, from Baby Yoda pillows to wilting vegetables––and she shares them freely.
She's a good cook too! She'd cooked the beans up with onions, spices, and a little molasses, I think.
A bunch of us ate them for lunch in the break room.

But that's not all E.D. did/didn't do. He handed me some Xeroxes of places you can get free food--"Pass these along to the person in need."
He pointed  to one of the sheets:
"This place provides hot meals on Saturdays."

I'm standing in front of you, telling you someone has NO FOOD on Monday, and you're telling me there's free food on Saturday?
What a fucking dimwit.

No. Here's what you do.
You hand me a fifty, and you say, "Tell Coworker this is from the Society."
The Society that employs us, whose mission is to lift people out of poverty.

Or, YOU go to the grocery store and buy 20 cans of chili, a 20-pack of mac-and-cheese, and some canned mixed vegetables––cheap and easy––and put them out for everyone.

The store suffers from poor leadership, I've always known that, but I'd thought the Exec. Director had a heart bigger than a Xeroxed list.
Guess not.
I'm extra glad now that I hadn't revealed who the person was, to be the victim of this charity.
(I'd brought them a hot sandwich from Subway and lent them a twenty--all they'd accept from me.)

And that's why it enrages me when people say things like, "Everyone is doing their best", or "People mean well".
That is limp. As Zora Neale Hurston said, Go hard or go home.

_____________________________

"Treat the public to some butter."

"I’m going to sit right here on this porch chair and prophesy that these are the last days of the know-nothing writers on Negro subjects.
Both editors and readers are clamoring for something that makes their side meat taste like ham, for to tell the truth, Negro reality is a hundred times more imaginative and entertaining than anything that has ever been hatched up over a typewriter.

"From now on, the writers must back their rubbish with something more substantial than the lay-figure of the past decade. Go hard or go home. Instead of coloring up coconut grease in the kitchen, go buy a cow and treat the public to some butter."

—Zora Neale Hurston, from “You Don’t Know Us Negroes” © 2022, via Oprah Daily, "Zora Neale Hurston’s Reflections and Insights Are Captured in You Don’t Know Us Negroes"