Food benefits skid to a stop in Kansas. Politics and government have utterly failed us.

There’s a word to describe the mess that Kansas and the rest of our country faces, now that the federal government shutdown has stopped food assistance.

That word is failure.

It’s a failure on the part of a Washington, D.C., governing class interested in scoring points at the expense of everyday people just trying to feed their families. It’s a failure of government bureaucrats — such as former Kansas Rep. Patrick Penn — who have used the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as a political bargaining chip in the months leading up to this shutdown.

More broadly, it’s a failure on the part of a society that allows so many to go hungry without government intervention. In the United States, one in eight people receives benefits through the program. That’s more than 12% of the country’s population. In Kansas, about 186,000 people receive SNAP, which is also known as food stamps. That’s more than 6% of our population.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve watched food prices rise, entry-level job opportunities disappear and a president take office whose persona depends on gilded excess.

What’s left for those who simply want to eat? Can they perhaps go to the planned East Wing ballroom at the White House for a sandwich and cup of soup? How about the remodeled Lincoln bathroom?

Don’t think I’m letting Democrats off the hook here, either. The whole reason we’re in this situation to begin with is the party’s somnambulant performance over President Joe Biden’s term and the failure of the party to inspire voters last year. Now out of power and searching for ways to prove their mettle, Democratic leaders picked a fight with the Trump administration over government funding.

Well, they got that fight. And their stated mission of renewing Affordable Care Act subsidies makes sense. But as people go hungry, does it really make sense to keep fighting a political battle?

I mentioned humorist Will Rogers last week. Back in 1931, he put his finger on the infuriating contraction of hunger in America: “Here we are, in a country with more wheat, and more corn, and more money in the bank, more cotton, more everything in the world; there’s not a product that you can name that we haven’t got more of than any other country ever had on the face of the earth, and yet we’ve got people starving. We’ll hold the distinction of being the only nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile.”

Here in Kansas, Gov. Laura Kelly’s administration has been involved in a legal feud with the U.S. Department of Agriculture over sharing personal information about SNAP recipients with the federal government. The overall message has been that hungry Kansans exist as political props. If Republicans can make Kelly look bad for protecting Kansans’ data, all the better.

Meanwhile, food banks brace for impact. Food drives have picked up across the country. At the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church, where I appeared at an event Saturday about media literacy, attendees brought a variety of canned and packaged food. They were doing their part. They were trying to help.

But dear reader, it made me angry. It made me furious. As I considered that food drive, as I thought about the stories Kansas Reflector has run over and over about SNAP, all I could focus on was that word: failure.

We have failed our fellow humans. And while both parties and our national government bear huge responsibility, so does our business class. So do all of us. We have mainstreamed hunger. We have left government benefits that partially solve this problem at the mercy of soulless political tacticians.

I wish I could believe that we can do better. But can we? Have we? What has happened to give us any indication that we could actually make progress in solving this problem?

Increasingly, I look at our nation and our government and see a system that no longer even pretends to do the best it can for people. Both political parties indulge in byzantine schemes, while leaders to the right hail authoritarian power grabs and those to the left squabble amongst themselves.

I walked through downtown Lawrence this weekend, feeling the autumn breeze and watching trees burst into improbable orange and yellow and red. I walked, and I did not despair or rage or grieve.

For a moment, the misery lifted. My thoughts took a positive turn. The interruption in SNAP benefits might prove short lived, thanks to court decisions. Our leaders might decide, having danced so close to the edge, to reach a lasting truce. Absent such breakthroughs, each one of us can take positive actions in our own lives — donating to that food drive or volunteering at that food bank. Or, I suppose, writing a column.

Yet I cannot shake the deep disappointment that gnaws at me late at night and early in the morning.

Bad times have come. And all of us are responsible.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.