Steve King: The freedom of want is still a dream

It was 79 years ago Thursday, on Jan. 6, 1941, that President Franklin Roosevelt delivered his famous “Four Freedoms” speech to Congress.

It was the main theme – the overriding and the only theme, really – of his 1941 State of the Union speech.

“In future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms,” FDR said. As he saw and described them:

• “The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world.

• “The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world.

• “The third is freedom of want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.

• “The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world.”

Then FDR added, “That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”

At the same time, Hitler was waging war on Europe and Japan was doing the same in the Pacific, and then almost exactly 11 months afterward, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to drag FDR and the United States, which had been staunchly isolationist, into World War II.

But though FDR’s words were swallowed up then, they survived the war and in 1948, the United Nations used the Four Freedoms as its guideline in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it adopted.

It’s the third freedom – “the freedom of want” – that is of particular interest, at least to me, as it applies to hunger, especially children. I think hunger is the biggest need of the four freedoms. You can’t live if there’s not enough to eat.

I have mentioned on a number of occasions in this space that I work a side job as a clerk at a convenient store. It is a great study in human behavior, most times in a positive fashion that warms your heart and soul, but still too many times that make you grit your teeth, bite your tongue and shake your head in disgust.

The store is located in a generally well-to-do city of 60,000 people situated near a much larger city. As with any big city, there are areas of economic difficulties within, and the biggest one in this particular city sets just four miles from the store.

Customers think nothing of dropping $100, and even $200 and more, on cigarettes, beer and lottery tickets. To each their own, and this is not a general diatribe against those expenditures, but only in the sense that that money could do so much to feed the hungry kids just down the road.

More specifically, if just 10 percent of the sales of the aforementioned items in any convenience store in the area, including ours, were to go instead to the local foodbank, it would fill a lot of empty stomachs.

That those people would, in my opinion, never consider taking that money and donating it, let alone actually doing it, is numbingly disappointing and disheartening.

All these years later, those needs – and those resulting emotions – persist.

Franklin Roosevelt would be saddened.