This is what hunger looks like.
JJ:
You ever seen a grown man cry over a grocery bill?
Monique M:
Twice this week. One of them was a vet. Other one had three kids and a busted radiator. She was asking how to stretch forty-three dollars across thirty days.
JJ:
Forty-three dollars.
Monique M:
That’s the average cut some folks saw this year. Pandemic-era boosts gone. Rent’s up. Eggs are still five bucks a dozen in half the cities I track.
JJ:
You tracking suffering like data?
Monique M:
I’m tracking survival. It’s my job to hand out lifeboats, but they keep shrinking the damn boats.
JJ:
Who’s shrinking them?
Monique M:
Congress. State-level administrators. Budget hawks who’ve never missed a meal. People who say “bootstraps” like it’s gospel. You know the drill.
JJ:
I know the drill. It was pointed at my uncle’s head when he got denied for assistance back in ’99. Said his disability check disqualified him. Said being poor wasn’t poor enough.
Monique M:
We lose staff every month. Burnout. Guilt. Some of us stay because walking away feels worse.
JJ:
So you’re inside the machine that’s grinding your own people.
Monique M:
I’m trying to jam it. I tell folks how to appeal, where the loopholes are, who to call when the office “loses” their paperwork for the third time. But it’s not enough. We need noise. We need backup.
JJ:
Forty-three dollars gone means forty-three meals gone. That’s a missed breakfast before school. That’s hunger making a child mean in class. That’s a mother eating instant noodles so her baby can have fruit.
Monique M:
And if she complains, the world says she’s lazy. Says she’s a leech. Says she should be grateful.
JJ:
Grateful for what?
Monique M:
A system that feeds her kids every other week and starves them in between.
JJ:
We’ve seen this game before. Starve the people. Blame the people. Punish the people for daring to survive.
Monique M:
So what do we do?
JJ:
We speak. We write. We show up. We use this page, this name, this legacy. No more waiting for things to get worse before we call it what it is: war by policy.
Monique M:
And you think that’ll change something?
JJ:
I know it will. It already is. You’re here. You came to speak. That’s how it starts.
Monique M:
Then let this be the start.
JJ:
Let it be the start, and not the end.
Food is a human right. The cuts to SNAP are not “budgeting.” They are violence by pen. This page stands with Monique M, and every worker, parent, elder, and child caught in this cycle. Forty-three dollars is a number. But behind it are names.
— Justice Jones