A Lesson From Japan

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​A LESSON FROM JAPAN

​    A few days ago one of my Facebook friends, Diane Hawley Nagatomo,

...a fellow writer from Japan and author of "The Butterfly Café," a sweet romance set in a tableau of Japanese culture and history that will be released on July 6, 2023, and to which I will gladly give a shout-out:

​​...anyway, a few days ago my friend shared this article on Facebook:

    According to the article, as well as several other articles I subsequently found on the subject, Japan is in the process of setting up vending machines in earthquake-vulnerable areas of that country which in case of an earthquake will automatically unlock so that people will be able to take from them free food and drinks. 
    Apparently in Japan food and drink vending machines are popular and can be found on almost every street as well as in public spaces.​

    It happened that I read the article about Japan's emergency free food vending machines this past Friday, the same day that, after weeks of a debt-ceiling stand-off during which a self-dealing faction of the United States Congress threatened to tip our country and the rest of the world into financial catastrophe and worried the living daylights out of those of us who were paying attention, a bipartisan deal was finally reached just days before the U.S. government would have run out of funds and defaulted on all of our financial obligations. 
       One of the concessions demanded by the Republican-held House of Representatives in exchange for voting to raise the debt ceiling was the institution of a strict work requirement for those who seek government food assistance. So insistent were the Republicans on a law that the poor must work for food that they stood their ground and would have let the global economy crash and burn before giving in.
       And so, with the economic doomsday clock ticking seconds away from midnight, President Biden conceded to their no- work-no-food demand and the impending financial crisis was averted.  
     Now, I know that the comparison isn't exact between Japan's plan to make sure no one goes hungry in an emergency and the United States' new policy to make sure that no one gets a mouthful of food that they don't deserve. And yet I can't help feeling that there's a lesson here about feeding the hungry that Japan could teach the United States, where Christians like to tout their country as a Christian country.
         As it stands now, I can't imagine my country building vending machines that would distribute free food in case of a natural disaster. We'd be far more likely to set up machines that distribute free guns.​

References
https://news.yahoo.com/japan-introduced-vending-machines-automatically-103852910.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

​https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/02/japan-vending-machines-to-automatically-offer-free-food-if-earthquake-hits