We can all do better when it comes to helping hungry children in Pickens County.

The vision many have of hunger is the swollen bellies of malnourished children in Africa. That vision allows our imaginations to go far away to a place where we can allow ourselves to escape the immediate need of hungry children.

Another vision is of children in squalid slums up north, in the cities or down some dirt road in an unknown place in a black and white picture from long ago. Our minds escape to “that doesn’t involve me.”

We can all do better.

Kathy Brazinski has a more vivid image that she uses when spreading the gospel of hunger in Pickens County. Brazinski was a principal at A.R. Lewis Elementary School two years ago when children started showing up with stomach aches at the school health room.

In tracking down why so many of her 6-12 year-olds were hurting, she found it was because many had not eaten or eaten much for a week end.

A.R. Lewis is in the heart of Pickens County poverty but don’t think it is the only place to find hungry children in Pickens County. At the time Brazinski was principal, one third of A.R. Lewis students lived in homes that the federal government considered inadequate.

We can all do better.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the explanation because this issue turns on a federal government definition. Many of those A.R. Lewis students bounced from relative to relative to have a warm, safe, dry place. Others lived in trailers with holes in the floor. Others bathed in a nearby creek because the structure that provided a roof didn’t include running water.

When was the last time any of us bathed in a creek in January or went more than two days without eating something?

So it doesn’t sound fair, but fair is not the issue.

Let’s not bow up our backs blaming this on lazy, addicted, incompetent, freeloading parents. Insufficient parenting may be the problem in many cases, but we can hardly blame 8-year-olds for those their parents. Blame followed by dismissal of the problem fails to find a solution except the solution to allow ourselves off the hook.

We can all do better.

So why are we on the hook in the first place?

None of us benefits from school children going hungry.

We put all this money into building schools and paying teachers and buying supplies and it goes to naught because large numbers of children can’t think on a Monday morning and they are worried on Thursday and Friday about going hungry next Saturday. (That bit of information comes from a national study on child hunger.)

Let this situation go on long enough and 8 year-olds going to the health room become 16 year olds going out in the community looking for something to eat or an unsavory way of buying it. That is another community problem.

We can all do better.

Regardless of our political stripes and our government or anti-government approach to such issues, we can all do more to feed hungry children. Growing more and better jobs, helping parents rise above their addictions, helping them avoid the health issues that drag them down and tap their resources.

Kathy Brazinski would say we could buy a ticket to the Pickens Rotary Club Spaghetti Dinner and Auction Saturday. The money goes to Pickens County’s Feed a Hungry Child, which gives Hungry children food to take home over the weekend.

Spend $10 for dinner that you are going to pay for anyway somewhere. Then bid on auction items for stuff that you and your better-off family may want anyway.

Do better. Feed a Hungry Child.

Tickets are available from any Pickens Rotary Club member, The Easley Progress office, Pickens Savings and Loan, The Stockade in Pickens, NAPA in Pickens.