Salon Says it May be Time to Fill Nashville's Cupboards
Nashville, circa 2010?
Twice in my first month in Nashville, I’ve heard the city referred to as a place “where no one goes hungry.” The reason? The Music City’s abundance of soup kitchens.
Assuming there’s truth entwined in that statement, lefty-leaning webzine Salon has some bad news for us…
Salon has a new life-in-a-recession personal essay series called “Pinched.” The second story is of Heather Ryan, an educated woman who, when the cupboard was bare, took her three kids to a soup kitchen for a hot meal.
Ryan has a master’s and a full-time job, not your stereotypical broke woman. But a divorce brought her down. And the mounting costs of everyday living—food, gas, daycare—forced her to seek out the kind of free handouts we associate with the terminally poor.
It’s a story that, unfortunately, could become more common as the shape of the economic downturn continues to reveal itself. Even in a city like Nashville, where the foreclosure crisis that's turning other cities into ghost towns has largely been avoided, the tightening of purse strings is unavoidable. And it's not a stretch to think that Ryan's precipitous fall from middle-class life could happen to a lot of people here, the city where no one goes hungry.
Comments
"Ryan has a master’s and a full-time job, not your stereotypical broke woman. But a divorce brought her down."
Well then it really wasn't the economy, was it?
Posted 08/22/2008 at 03:57:04 PMYour point would be valid if instead of reading about Ms. Ryan's downfall in Eugene, Or., you actually used your time to take to the streets of Nashville to see if the same thing IS happening here. "Could" and "might" are lazy words for a journalist. Find out what "is" and I'll start reading your blog entries again.
Posted 08/24/2008 at 10:03:07 AM