D.C. man finds blessings in mission to help homeless

The digital bank clock across from Capitol Hill United Methodist Church reads 7:25 a.m. and 27 degrees when Rob Farley, congregant, lawyer and aspiring Christian, jogs up to the church's icy front landing. Waiting for him in the chilly rain are the people who have transformed his life.

Jonathan George, a joke-telling handyman from the Bronx, is stuffing into plastic trash bags the sleeping bag, two blankets and cardboard he uses for a bed. Howard James, 51, and his "lady friend," Mercedes Dessaso, 61, are just showing up after a frigid, wet night wandering near Union Station. Melvin Johnson, with a damp sweat shirt and a cane, chuckles as he says, "We are wild animals."

Farley, slender and sweaty in black running pants, bears a smile, a front-door key and the mission he has been committed to almost every morning for a year: to provide breakfast, a clean bathroom, a group prayer and some dignity to a small band of homeless men and women who view this church landing five blocks east of the U.S. Capitol as a version of home.

For Farley, the routine has given his faith a purpose, his vow to be a better person a tangible test. The 47-year-old is feeding the homeless, and it's clear that they are feeding him, if in a different way.

This was a guy who, until a few years ago, couldn't remember going to church aside from the time that, decades ago, his mother threatened to take away his Super Bowl-watching privileges if he didn't attend. A guy whose initial intention was just to end his morning jog by waking the homeless and kindly urging them to move on.

Then God happened. Or something like that.

"Either you turn your head or you engage," says Farley, a soft-spoken Tennessean who doesn't easily talk about himself.

Although some of the folks have been going to the church for many years -- either to sleep under its overhang, attend weekly meals for the homeless or participate in regular worship -- the daily breakfast began only about a year ago.

It was a confluence of two things: neighbors complaining about the sometimes-disruptive scene on the landing, and Farley's baptism and increasing fixation with living his faith.


Growing up in the Bible Belt, and seeing what he describes as religion being used in national politics as a cultural sledgehammer, left him alienated but also curious. What was going on in churches? After the 2004 presidential election, his then-wife suggested that they browse a few services. They wound up at the United Methodist church near their home on Capitol Hill.

"I didn't think the church had much to offer, so I went more as an observer," he said. "Everyone else would bow their heads, and I would be looking around."

But if he was going to really explore church, that meant plunging in. Within a year, he'd been baptized and began asking a question he says he now thinks about constantly: How can I take the Gospel seriously?

Source:washingtonpost.com/

Fight Club

While the political parties duke it out over divisive social issues, the majority of Americans remain steadfastly in the middle.

Presidents have been trying, without success, to get Congress to pass sweeping national health-care reform since the administration of Harry Truman. So one might have expected some celebration, at least a moment of recognition for a difficult achievement, when the U.S. Senate voted on Christmas Eve to approve a bill that will extend health-care insurance to 30 million Americans. Instead, the public reaction was ho-hum. Most polls registered a divided or disinterested electorate, and some surveys have suggested considerable confusion over what was actually in the bill. A Washington Post–ABC poll the week before Christmas showed that less than half—44 percent—approved of President Obama's handling of health care, while even fewer—39 percent—thought the Republicans would do a better job. In effect, the American people seemed to be throwing up their hands and scorning the ability of the politicians to govern on such an important matter.

It's not hard to see why. Compromise is often painful, but the push to get a bill out of the Senate verged on the squalid. Senators joked bitterly about the "Cornhusker kickback," the generous concessions made to Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, to win his 60th and deciding vote. The atmosphere on the Senate floor was at times poisonous as the parties postured and squabbled. "This body prides itself on being the world's greatest deliberative body," said Sen. Arlen Specter, Democrat (formerly Republican) of Pennsylvania. "That designation has been destroyed with what has occurred here the past few days." The low point may have come when Sen. Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, declared, "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote." At the time, there was some question whether the ailing Sen. Robert Byrd, 92, would live long enough to give the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority. "This statement goes too far," responded Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat. "We are becoming more coarse and divided here."



More divided, that's for sure. Congress has always had its cruder elements—during the late 1950s and early 1960s, senators from both parties patronized prostitutes at the Quorum Club at the Carroll Arms Hotel, just across the street from the Capitol. The bar was run by Bobby Baker, the Democratic secretary of the Senate. But lawmakers in that era more often reached across the aisle to vote together as well as to play together. The congressional culture of the 1950s and early 1960s—"where Democrats and Republicans generally treated each other with civility during working hours and many drank, played poker, and golfed together after hours—is long gone," writes Morris Fiorina, a scholar of political science at Stanford University. In his new book, Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, Fiorina argues that while the political class—the pols and their partisans in interest groups and in the media—has grown increasingly contentious over social issues like abortion and immigration, the vast majority of voters are more moderate. They are turned off by the rigid, angry battles between the politicians of the right and the left, and their cheering sections and hangers-on in Washington.

Fierce partisanship is hardly new, unexpected, or, for that matter, unwelcome on Capitol Hill, and at earlier times in our history elected representatives have, in the heat of debate, attacked each other with their fists. But as the rancorous and seemingly endless health-care debate dragged on, Congress appeared ever-more polarized. Lawmakers fought bitterly over whether to fund abortions—a question that inspired passion, but was only marginally relevant to overall health-care reform—and they drew lines in the sand that seemed baffling to many Americans, at least those who aren't glued to the perpetual shouting matches on Fox or MSNBC. Left-wing supporters of the much-contested "public option" deemed it essential to reform, while those on the right cried "Socialism!" Actually, the Congressional Budget Office found that the public option would make little difference to the number of people covered or to the cost of premiums. Its importance was far more symbolic than real.

Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine is one of the last two moderate Republicans in the Northeast, once a thriving tribe (the other is the state's junior senator, Susan Collins). Snowe was the one Republican who might have voted for the health-reform bill, though in the end even she did not. But in a speech on the Senate floor in early December, Snowe pointed out a disturbing historical fact: health-care reform is the only piece of major social-welfare legislation ever to pass the Senate on a straight party-line vote. When Social Security was enacted during the New Deal, significant majorities of Republicans in both the House and Senate voted for the measure, even though Democrats controlled Congress. Likewise for the passage of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s. Significant numbers of Republicans (41 percent in the Senate, 50 percent in the House) voted for Medicare in 1965. "Policies that will affect more than 300 million people simply should not be decided by partisan, one-vote-margin strategies," said Snowe.

Professor Fiorina notes that the political parties are becoming more extreme. The percentage of Republican delegates to nominating conventions who identify themselves as "very conservative" has risen from about 12 percent to more than 30 percent since 1972, and the percentage of "very liberal" Democratic delegates has grown from about 8 percent to nearly 20 percent. By contrast, surveys of the general public show little change in "very conservative" and "very liberal" percentages. Voters tend to be quirkier in their opinions—they don't go down a checklist on "wedge issues," but rather show inconsistency and ambivalence. A self-described conservative who hates big government may nonetheless want government to cut the bonuses of Wall Street financiers.

Fiorina's somewhat sweeping conclusions in Disconnect are questioned by other political experts like Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution, who argues that the voters are almost as partisan as their representatives—that the red state–blue state divide is real and growing deeper. But differences between the scholars seem to be questions of degree, and all seem to share the view that Capitol Hill has become disturbingly uncivil and polarized. The politicians are egged on by ever-more powerful interest groups and the attack-mode spirit of radio talk shows and cable TV. President Obama has tried, fitfully and without not-able effect, to inspire lawmakers to rise above petty factionalism. If he wants to get anything more accomplished over the course of his presidency, he will have to try harder. There is no other obvious cure to the problem of political polarization. Fiorina offers none. He suggests only that in time, we will become so weary of our punitive politics that the system will, out of necessity, "outgrow" or "outlive" its current fractiousness. Which is a polite way of saying that things are probably going to get worse before they get better.

Source:newsweek.com/

After passing 2 health bills, Hill must now build bridge

WASHINGTON - -- Even as Senate Democrats celebrated passing landmark health care legislation last week, they knew the arm-twisting and dealmaking wasn't close to being over.

The $871 billion Senate measure, which passed early Christmas Eve in a taut, party-line vote, now must be reconciled with a $1 trillion House version that passed in early November. While the two bills are more alike than different, working out the kinks won't be an entirely smooth process.

What form that process will take also remains unclear. Typically, differences are ironed out in a joint House-Senate conference committee. But last week, sentiments on Capitol Hill were moving away from such a formal structure in favor of a looser negotiating framework that could allow greater flexibility to fashion a compromise.

And because Republicans will play no role in shaping the final product, Democrats are free to do as they see fit -- which could mean a handful of leaders from both houses, along with key committee chairs, will hammer out a deal behind closed doors with the goal of sending a bill to President Barack Obama by early February. Both the House and the Senate will have to vote again on the measure before that happens.

Members of the Obama administration, including the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, will also be heavily involved in the talks.

"We've got two bills, one in the House, one in the Senate; they're 95 percent similar," White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton said Thursday. "We're going to be actively working to iron out the rest of the differences and get a bill passed and signed."

Regardless of the format, the Senate is expected to have the upper hand in any negotiations, because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., needs the vote of every one of the 58 members of his caucus along with the two independents in the chamber to ward off a Republican filibuster.

Senators such as Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, whom Reid courted until the last minute, have already pledged to withdraw their support if the bill deviates too much from the Senate version.

For Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the challenge will come in keeping Senate moderates on board without triggering defections from House liberals, who are aggrieved that the Senate bill dispensed with cherished provisions such as a government-run insurer -- the "public option" -- that would compete with private companies.

But no one on Capitol Hill seems to believe that the lack of a public option will be a deal-breaker. And Pelosi and other House leaders will have a simple message for intransigent members: Do you want to be the one who keeps a historic health care bill from the president's desk?

It's also possible that the more the final bill begins to resemble the Senate version, the greater the chance that some of the 39 centrist Democrats in the House who voted against the bill could come on board.

Both versions of the bill set up insurance exchanges, where people could buy health policies with the help of federal subsidies. Both expand the reach of the Medicaid program and both impose new rules on insurers, including prohibiting them from rejecting customers based on their medical history.

But there are some significant differences. A key sticking point in the talks may be the issue of abortion coverage and the federal subsidies. The more restrictive House bill prohibits anyone receiving subsidies from buying an individual policy that covers abortion through the new insurance exchange. The Senate bill would only prohibit the use of federal funds for such coverage and would require insurance companies to segregate public and private funds.

Another potential flash point involves how each version is financed. The Senate bill partially relies on taxes on high-end, so-called Cadillac insurance plans -- a tax bitterly opposed by labor unions. The House bill imposes a surcharge on Americans who earn more than $500,000 a year and families earning more than $1 million.

House liberals may seek to extract some other changes to the Senate bill in return for jettisoning the public option, including increasing the amount of the subsidies or moving up the date the new insurance exchanges would take effect one year, to 2013.

How those exchanges would operate is another disparity: House Democrats want that exchange to be a national one, while the Senate bill calls for a state-based system.

The talks could be heated, especially after House leaders have pledged not to "roll over" for the Senate. But it was clear at the end of last week that even the liberals weren't drawing lines in the sand and were ready to deal.

"It doesn't have to be called a public option," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "The main issue for Democrats in the House is affordability."

Janet Hook of the Tribune Newspapers Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

Source:chicagotribune.com

Why we went to Washington, D.C.

Why some of us went to Washington, D.C., recently, myself and my wife included, is because our very existence as a nation is at stake.

Our federal government has run over our Constitution with out of control spending and takeover. Most of what the Congress does is unconstitutional.

The only thing that those elected officials in Washington fear is the voice of the American people. In person!

That is why we took our time and money to leave our comfortable living room and join the recent rally in Washington to protest the virtual takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

Last night, I was reading a letter from another patriot published in your paper, “Was it worth it?” and thinking, “This guy went for the same reason(s) that we went.” Then when I got to the bottom of the page, I realized that I knew this person.

It was Woody. Even though we didn’t see each other at the rally, we both agreed that it was worth the time and effort to let ourselves be heard and will do it again when necessary.

I challenge each of you: get off your sofa, stop yelling at the TV, and join with us the next time we rally in D.C. I will hopefully be putting together a bus from Peachtree City.

You may write me at jcurrie6@bellsouth.net and request that we reserve a spot for you on the next Patriot bus, bound for D.C.

John Currie

Peachtree City, Ga.

Source:thecitizen.com/

Around South County: Youth choir invited to sing at National Tree

Courtesy photo Jeff Myers, left, and Charles Case rehearse as part of the Voices in Praise choir.








Snow cancels their performance, but the group is still optimistic
By Mitchelle Stephenson, For The Capital

The youth choir at Friendship United Methodist Church, Voices In Praise, recently was invited to participate in festivities in Washington, D.C., at the National Christmas Tree and the Pageant of Peace.

Unfortunately for the 40 teenagers, Mother Nature had other plans in the form of a winter storm that paralyzed the region and caused their performance to be canceled.

Holly Reynolds Lee is the director of the group. She has been conducting the choir for a dozen years. Earlier this year, she saw a call for performers and sent information off to the National Park Service, which manages the Pageant of Peace.

To her surprise and delight, Voices in Praise was notified in the fall that the group was invited to perform on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. at 8 p.m. Dec. 19.

Charles Case, 17, is one of the performers and a member of the choir for about three years. Before joining Voices in Praise, he didn't even know that he had a passion or a talent for singing. But once he was introduced to the group, he was hooked. Now he not only sings with Voices in Praise, but he has also joined most of the vocal and drama programs at his school - Southern High School in Harwood. He even has plans to pursue music in college next year.

Although he has traveled internationally with the choir, the news that they were going to sing at one of the big local events of the holiday season had him pretty excited.

"I thought it was just about the coolest thing in my whole lifetime," Charles said.

But when he heard the forecast last week, he said he was disappointed.

"Stuff like that happens and there is nothing you can do to control it," Charles said.

Another performer, Dylan Fredericks, 17, was also excited about the performance.

"It was a very good opportunity, and we had a good time slot. We were all bummed," Dylan said.

But the students learned shortly after the cancellation of their Saturday performance that another group, one slated to perform on Monday night, had missed its flight. The Park Service was looking for a local group to fill the slot.

Holly said that when she got the call canceling the performance, "my heart sank. This was one of the performances that my singers were really looking forward to."

They already had their 30-minute set list, which included songs like "Carol of the Bells" and "Angels We Have Heard on High." The park service simply moved Voices in Praise to 6 p.m. Dec. 21.

Alas, the area for the performers wasn't cleared of snow by Monday afternoon and the Park Service again canceled all the evening performances.

Mary Brooke Umhau, 15, has been in the choir for three years. "We were singing a really pretty arrangement of 'Shepherd's Pipe Carol' by John Rudder, and it is just a fantastic piece of music. They play it on the radio, so it is fun to be able to say, 'Hey, I sing that one,' " Mary said.

The group has had a number of opportunities to perform outside of the parish. In 2006, they traveled as a group to Ireland, singing in Galway, Dublin and Belfast. They visited a variety of places, including churches, but also children's hospitals and shelters.

Last summer they traveled to Texas and did a weeklong tour.

"We went as a whole choir, and we did a lot of charity work, singing for a lot of different people. We sang at the Alamo, homeless shelters, at a children's hospital to children with terminal illnesses," Charles said.

Holly accepts anyone who comes and wants to participate. The group performs a mix of classics, contemporary and gospel music.

Mary, Charles and Dylan all said that the main reason they like the choir - apart from singing - is the friendships they have forged through their experience.

Fortunately for the parishioners of Friendship United Methodist Church, the Voices in Praise choir will be performing at the Christmas Eve service at 8 p.m. today at the church in Friendship - between Deale and Owings just off Route 2.

They will also be performing a free Epiphany concert for the community on Jan. 10 at Friendship United Methodist. If they get the opportunity to perform at the National Tree in the next few days, information will be posted to their blog: voicesinpraise.blogspot.com.

Students at Lothian Elementary School created and sent 210 greeting cards to troops earlier this month. The children, with the help of their art teacher, Donna Schmitz, and the coordinating efforts of the American Legion, participated as part of the Holiday Greetings for Heroes program.

"The students realize that it is hard to be away from family and friends and wanted to show their gratitude to the soldiers for serving our country," Donna said.

The cards will be distributed to soldiers from Maryland.

Source:hometownannapolis.com

DC Sports In The 2000's: A Decade of Disappointment

We continue our look at the trials and tribulations, the failures and successes of DC's four pro franchises in the past decade. In Part 1, we analyzed the Redskins' performance over the last ten years. In Part 2, we broke down the Wizards' journey in the 2000s. In Part 3, we hit the ice with the Capitals, led by a dynamic owner and a two-time MVP.

Like Dan Snyder and the Redskins, the Washington Capitals began this decade with a new owner. A young former businessman and sports fan Ted Leonsis, purchased the team in 1999 from original owner Abe Pollin. Both owners have spent the first decade of this millennium learning through experience how to run a professional sports team. Both have had a mixed bag of successes and letdowns and both are still waiting to win a championship. In the past ten years Ted Leonsis and the Capitals have had considerably better regular season success than the Redskins, Wizards, and Nationals. The Caps have won four division titles this decade and finished in second place twice while neither the Redskins, Nationals, or Wizards have won their division. Shockingly, however, the Capitals have only advanced in the playoffs once in the 2000’s, equal to that of the Wizards, and less than the Redskins who did it two times.

How could it be that the Capitals have been so disappointing when it comes to winning in the playoffs? There is no clear answer but the consensus is that the Caps are on the right path and will get their fair share of chances in the next few years. Comcast SportsNet anchor Russ Thaler explains the last ten years for the Caps as the “decade that Ted Leonsis learned how to be a successful owner.” Thaler said that through trial and error Leonsis has built a “winning team from top to bottom,” eventually engineering a “Caps emergence on the D.C. sports scene.”

When Ted Leonsis took over the Capitals in 1999 the team was one season removed from a Stanley Cup appearance. The season before he bought the team was marred by injuries and they had missed the playoffs. Leonsis’ first two regular seasons as owner were out of a storybook, as the Caps twice captured the Southeast Division Title. Both years ended prematurely with playoff series defeats to the Pittsburgh Penguins.

In the offseason of 2001, Leonsis and the Capitals decided the best way to beat the Pittsburgh Penguins was to acquire their best player. The Caps traded three young prospects to the Pens for five-time Art Ross Trophy-winner Jaromir Jagr. Later that year Washington signed Jagr to a seven year, $77 million dollar contract, the highest in NHL history at the time. When Jagr came to the Caps he was arguably the best player in the National Hockey League. His acquisition brought considerable hype to a team that played in a city that had previously flown under the sport’s radar. Though Jagr and the Capitals failed to make the playoffs in his first season the team set a franchise record for home game attendance.

In the summer of 2002 the Capitals continued to aggressively build their roster, they signed Jagr’s former linemate from Pittsburgh, Robert Lang. The Caps did not make the playoffs the next year but were back in the postseason in 2003. In the 2003 playoffs they lost a devastating series to the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Caps won the first two games against Tampa Bay, only to get swept in the next four. In Game Six, in D.C., the loss became especially painful as the two teams fought through overtime. The Lightning got the victory when a too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty led to a Lightning power-play where Martin St. Louis scored the game-clinching goal.

Comcast SportsNet managing editor Joe Yasharoff saw Jaromir Jagr’s years in Washington as having “highlights here and there, but overall he absolutely didn’t live up to the hype.” He was brought in to make the Capitals a Stanley Cup contender but the plans just never materialized. The loss to the Lightning precipitated an effort by the Caps to scrap their roster and rebuild. In 2003, over budget and with a league lock-out looming, the Caps traded away many of their roster’s centerpieces including Steve Konawalchuk, Peter Bondra, Sergei Gonchar, and Jaromir Jagr. They went on to win the NHL Draft Lottery and secure the number one overall pick.


In finishing at the bottom of the league the Capitals received draft lottery odds with the third best chance to get the first pick. With extraordinary luck they drew the number one pick and were able to select Russian phenom Alexander Ovechkin, a prospect that Yasharoff described as a “once-in-a-lifetime player.” Ovie’s arrival changed everything, it drastically altered the course of a franchise and forever changed the landscape of Washington, D.C. professional sports.

In that stroke of luck in landing Alex Ovechkin, the Caps curbed the trend that has plagued the district’s other franchises. The Wizards and Redskins have had terrible misfortune in drafts of late and have been adversely affected by wasted picks. The Capitals were not only fortunate enough to be able to draft Ovechkin but the pace at which he has developed is unbelievable. Alex Ovechkin came into the league as a can’t-miss prospect but was still overshadowed by the “heir apparent” to Wayne Gretzky,
Sidney Crosby. Ever since Crosby was in middle school he was tabbed as the successor to the greatest player to take the ice. Since both have entered the league, however, the “Great Eight” has shown a closer resemblance to the “Great One.”

At just 24 years old, Ovechkin has already claimed the Calder Trophy for rookie of the year and two Hart Memorial Trophies as league MVP. His emergence as a superstar and most valuable player was quicker than Lebron James and Tim Lincecum. He is the best hockey player in the world and he resides in Washington, D.C.

Russ Thaler points to Ovechkin as a rarity in the nation’s capital in the sense that he “started here, made his name here, and became a winner here.” In the last decade there have been few players that D.C. sports fans can point to with the same career path. Most of the aging stars that have come through the turnstiles -Michael Jordan, Jaromir Jagr, Bruce Smith, Deion Sanders, Jerry Stackhouse, Brandon Lang, Jason Taylor- failed to bring success to Washington. Any success Ovechkin has will be in Washington, the Capitals locked him up with a 13-year, $124 million contract extension in 2008.

In Ovechkin’s professional career the Capitals have certainly become winners in the regular season. However, they still have not made a deep run in the playoffs. They missed out entirely in Ovie’s first season but have made the postseason in the two seasons since, each time losing in a game seven. In Ovechkin's first playoff series, the Caps rallied from a 3-1 series deficit to force a seventh game against the Philadelphia Flyers, only to lose the game (and the series) 3-2 in overtime.

That offseason, the Capitals front office made a tough decision in letting long-time goalie Olaf Kölzig go via free agency. Kölzig had played his entire career in the Capitals organization. He helped the Caps reach the Stanley Cup Finals in 1998 and won the Vezina Trophy in 2000 for the NHL’s best goalie. The decision was unpopular but was in the team’s best interest. Kölzig had been one of the most popular players in team history but he was past his prime. The Capitals replaced him and were able to win the division once again the next year and return to the playoffs.

The playoff exit for the Capitals in 2009 was one that D.C. fans would like to forget. Dismissed a year earlier in Game Seven of the first round, Washington was triumphant in their first series in '09, defeating the 7th seeded New York Rangers. The Caps had fallen into a 0-2 series deficit before newly promoted goalie Semyon Varlamov helped them top the Rangers in seven games.

In the second round, hockey fans got their dream matchup. The Caps faced their longtime playoff nemesis and 2008 Stanley Cup runner-up, the Pittsburgh Penguins. The series showcased possibly the three best players in professional hockey: Ovechkin, Crosby, and Evgeny Malkin.

For most of the series, the showdown lived up to the hype and more. Ovechkin and Crosby dueled under the spotlight created by a personal rivalry stemming from the regular season. An exchange of words created an almost Magic and Bird-type aura around their competition. The series was highlighted by an outstanding Game Two in which both Ovechkin and Crosby scored hat tricks. By the time Game Seven got underway, even the most casual hockey fans were glued to their television set. What ensued was a Capitals letdown of epic proportions. The Penguins immediately took control, jumping out to a 4-0 lead just 2:13 into the second period. The game was capped off by two Sidney Crosby goals as Pittsburgh took the series on their way to a Stanley Cup Title.


Despite the crushing loss to Pittsburgh, the Washington Capitals should have plenty of chances for playoff success ahead of them. Just because they didn’t get past the second round in this decade does not mean it won’t happen soon. The Caps are a young team with a core of legitimate star players and an excellent minor league system. They will more than likely make a deep run towards a Stanley Cup in the near future, maybe even this spring.

Source:csnwashington.com/

Happy Thanksgiving Day To All

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - This Thanksgiving Day will be celebrated across the country by people sitting down to eat together, a tradition that started with 53 pilgrims gathering with 90 Indians to sit together and enjoy a public feast celebrating and sharing a bountiful harvest.


And while America is known for being a land of plenty, that isn't the case for all. People in at least 14.6 percent of all households in the United States went hungry at some point last year. That rate was "the highest recorded prevalence rate of food insecurity since 1995 when the first national food security survey was conducted," the Economic Research Service (ERS) wrote in a statement on its Website. ERS is a primary source of economic information and research in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

So while President Barack Obama and his family spend Thanksgiving Day at home in the White House, and millions of Americans gather in private homes with friends and relatives to feast together, thousands of volunteers around the country are continuing the tradition of a public feast by preparing food and inviting people who are homeless, or less fortunate, or elderly or simply alone to gather to eat together and share the bounty.

In addition to public gatherings, thousands of volunteers across the country will also deliver Thanksgiving meals to the elderly or to invalids who are housebound.

The first Thanksgiving was a three-day feast celebrated by the pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts in 1621. The annual Thanksgiving Day tradition as Americans now celebrate didn't become a federal holiday until 1941.

The AHN Media family wishes all our readers a happy Thanksgiving Day.





Sourceallheadlinenews.com