We are often told that America is such a wonderfully free country and that is why we are taking our show on the road to spreed the wonderful joys of freedom across the globe. Without our benevolence, backwards peoples will have to labor on in their own delusions, never understanding what true liberty is all about.

Here is the price of freedom and the American dream.

One in 20 Hispanics goes to bed hungry (h/t to gordo at appletree)

Five percent of Hispanics in the US regularly go hungry and as many as 20% do not have sufficient access to nutritious food, a US report says. Poverty and lack of awareness about state entitlements are the causes, says the study by Hispanic civil rights group the National Council of La Raza.

Immigrants also face a series of linguistic, legal and cultural obstacles in accessing enough food. The study showed that the number of Hispanics going hungry was significantly higher than for non-Hispanic whites (3%), but lower than the figure for non-Hispanic blacks (8%).

A similar number of Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks suffered from a lack of access to healthy food, around four times more than non-Hispanic whites.

It is time to rewrite the poem written by Emma Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This is a nation turned cold and would rather do nothing more but chew up the huddled mass and spit them out heart broken and disillusioned.

Not so long ago, Irma, 44, had achieved her own modest version of the American dream in San Antonio, where she lived illegally for more than six years. She had left Mexico with three of her four daughters, escaping financial turmoil and a violent marriage.

Three years ago, her daughter Mayra, a high school senior, stunned her with the news she was pregnant and intended to marry her boyfriend. Another daughter, Barbie, not yet 16, was adamant that she, too, was getting married and moving out.

Disillusioned and feeling abandoned, she attended her daughters’ weddings but did not stick around for the weekend parties. Soon she was on her way back to Monterrey, Mexico, in a pickup with her youngest daughter.

Now all she has to show for her migration to the United States, she said, is the heartache of separation.

When I see stories like this, especially around Christmas time, I am reminded of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match-Seller/Girl

She again rubbed a match on the wall, and the light shone round her; in the brightness stood her old grandmother, clear and shining, yet mild and loving in her appearance. “Grandmother,” cried the little one, “O take me with you; I know you will go away when the match burns out; you will vanish like the warm stove, the roast goose, and the large, glorious Christmas-tree.” And she made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.

In the dawn of morning there lay the poor little one, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, leaning against the wall; she had been frozen to death on the last evening of the year; and the New-year�s sun rose and shone upon a little corpse! The child still sat, in the stiffness of death, holding the matches in her hand, one bundle of which was burnt. “She tried to warm herself,” said some. No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her grandmother, on New-year�s day.

No one will ever take the time to hear their stories. I say the time is now.

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