Elmo's Pink Slip

My mom and dad were steadfast volunteers for Meals on Wheels. She coordinated volunteers, and he served as the fill-in when one of the regular volunteers was ill or out-of-town. If my sister had a day off work and he needed help, he’d call her. When I visited my parents, he enlisted me a couple of times to assist him in delivering meals to the homebound, checking in on our community’s most vulnerable older adults. In fact, so committed to delivering those meals, he answered the call when another volunteer fell in the snow, breaking his own seventy-eight-year-old hip in a similar fall.

So when I heard that funding for Meals on Wheels was on the chopping block in the recent federal budget proposal, it hit a sentimental nerve. But the more I learned about the proposed cuts, the less sentimental I became, and the more concerned about the quality of life in our country – and in our county.

Does your seventy-five-year-old Aunt Matilda, who lives in the drafty homestead out in Nova, receive a once-a-year Winter Crisis payment towards her heating bill? She and at least five hundred other households here in Ashland County will lose that assistance.

Do you listen for tornado warnings in Nankin or Rowsburg? Those new systems were installed because of Community Development Block Grants, along with various sewer projects and road paving in the county. Have you walked the Freer Field path (also known as the Dale-Roy sidewalk project)? CDBG funds as well as privately-raised funds made this possible.

Did you realize your neighbor has a new ramp leading into her house, allowing her access to the family home despite her worsening multiple sclerosis? That HUD-finded program, that can also help with disintegrating foundations or wells that run dry, is slated to be eliminated too.

Have you ever ridden Amtrak? One summer, work schedule didn’t allow for one of our sons to travel with us to Maine on our family vacation, but he was able to travel on the train, with enough time in Philadelphia to grab a cheesesteak. As it stands, all Ohio Amtrak service will be eliminated.

While the waters of Lakes Erie, Niagara, Huron, Superior and Michigan don’t lap upon Ashland County shores, we’re close enough to the Great Lakes to be concerned about the toxic pollution hotspots the Great Lakes Restoration funding attempts to mitigate. And there are also nuisance species like phragmites, an invasive reed which blogger Jim McCormac described as “scrambling around with astonishing speed, threading its way into all available nooks and crannies like a chlorophyll-filled cockroach.” I’m not a naturalist or botanist, but I see a horror movie in my future, with the uncontrolled twenty-foot tall phragmites crawling out of my bathtub drain.

As to the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, what can I say? If you’re a regular reader, you know my view on the value of the arts and humanities. As Arlene Goldbard noted, these cuts would threaten “the small programs that help us know and understand each other.” Programs like Ashland Chautauqua, regional arts centers, the Massillon Museum, and perhaps even our own Schine Theater project, part of downtown revitalization. Why? Because elimination of federal funds will also increase competition for state funds.

The Center for Public Broadcasting, which includes funding for NPR, PBS, and local affiliates, is also threatened. To draw attention to this threat, a video is making the rounds on social media that documents the firing of Elmo after thirty-two years of employment on Sesame Street Workshop. He’s given the job lead of taking pictures with tourists in Times Square for tips, not a good option.

Yet after he mulls on his own loss, he has two other questions. The first is his concern for the other monsters who are losing their jobs, but the second is this one “But what about the kids?”

What about the kids, our kids? What about the elderly who want to remain in their own home? What about those who need heating or housing assistance, safe water, a nutritious meal? What about us? Today, I’m wondering about that too, Elmo.