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The day the earth stood still and madness prevailed.

Why me as I? God only knows Why.

Why oh why tell me why am I feeling this way? Is love a live is t a thing? Tell me how high can I go with you by my side. Canwe run the speed of Superman? Can we indeed Fly? Tell me who and what is life. Who am I with you by my side? Shall Mother Marey Provide? A i staying alive for a Purpus. All I known and all I feel is for you to stay. Who am I without you by my side?

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https://www.perplexity.ai/computer/a/essay-skipping-meals-gJywu83YQYijuPqCH9YABA

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I Know What Hunger Smells Like

PERSONAL ESSAY I Know What Hunger Smells Like One in three Americans is skipping meals in 2026. I grew up being that person. Here is what they need the people in power to understand. By Donnie Harold Harris Army veteran. 50 years in construction. Unity Party of America. Indianapolis, Indiana. April 19, 2026 — There is a smell to hunger that people who have never been truly hungry do not know. It lives in the back of a house with no heat in January, somewhere between wet plaster and the absence of anything cooking. I grew up in that smell. I was the seventh child of a teenage mother in Indianapolis, Indiana. We moved more than a hundred times before I was old enough to count. I attended twenty-one different schools. We did not talk about poverty the way academics talk about it now — with data sets and policy papers and charts. We just lived it. Every day was a calculation: which bill do you let go, which meal do you cut in half, which child gets the coat. So when a new survey from Ms. Magazine and the Century Foundation tells me that one in three Americans is skipping meals today — in 2026, in the richest country in the history of the world — I do not read that as a statistic. I read it as a letter from a house I used to live in. “Policy made by people who have never missed a meal will always miss the point.” What One in Three Actually Means The survey found that 33 percent of Americans are skipping meals to pay their bills. Twenty-nine percent are delaying medical care they know they need. Half are draining their savings just to cover routine monthly expenses. The finding that hit me hardest: working-class people — the ones who build the buildings, lay the pipes, drive the trucks, stock the shelves — are twice as likely as college-educated Americans to skip food or medication. Twice. The people doing the work that keeps this country running are the same people going without. I spent fifty years in construction. I know those people. I was those people. And what the survey cannot capture — what no survey ever can — is the specific geography of that sacrifice. It is not an abstract budget line. It is a parent staring into a refrigerator at 11 o'clock at night deciding which child's lunch to cut shorter tomorrow. It is a veteran choosing between insulin and the electric bill. It is a calculation made so many times it stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the weather. — The Education of a Hungry Kid in Indianapolis I did not learn poverty from a book. I learned it from the specific texture of going to school after a night with nothing in the kitchen. The way your head goes light around 10 in the morning. The way you learn to position yourself so the teacher cannot tell you have not eaten. The particular shame of free lunch — not because it was wrong to receive it, but because at eleven years old you have already absorbed the message that needing help is something to hide. What no one told me then, and what I have spent a lifetime working out, is that this was not the result of failure. It was the result of a system designed without us in mind. My mother was not careless. She was overwhelmed, young, and without a single structural support that could have changed our trajectory. The decisions that shaped my childhood were made by people in rooms she would never be invited into. That is still true today. The decisions being made right now about wages, about healthcare costs, about what counts as a living and what does not — they are being made by people who have not been in that kitchen. Who have not done that calculation. Who have not smelled what I smelled. “No one who works an honest forty hours should have to work forty more just to stand still.” The Side-Hustle Trap The same week this survey dropped, a separate report found that more than half of Americans are now working multiple jobs just to survive. Not to get ahead. To survive. We have built an entire cultural mythology around this — the hustle, the grind, the bootstrap — as though the need to work two jobs is a character trait rather than an indictment of a wage structure that has not kept pace with the cost of living for a generation. We celebrate resilience while manufacturing the conditions that require it. I worked fifty years in construction. I believe in honest labor with everything I am. But honest labor is supposed to be enough. When it stops being enough — when a full-time working person still has to count meals at the end of the month — the problem is not the worker. The problem is the deal that was made on their behalf without them in the room. — What I Want the People in Power to Understand I am not writing this to be pitied. I have never wanted pity. I am writing it because I am running for office, and I believe the only honest thing a candidate can do is tell you exactly where they come from and exactly what that means for how they will govern. Here is what it means for me: I will not romanticize poverty. It is not character-building. It is a waste of human potential on a scale that should embarrass every one of us. Every child who goes hungry is a contribution this country will never receive, a problem that will compound for generations, a cost paid by everyone whether we acknowledge it or not. I will not accept the premise that this is inevitable. The same country that can spend what it spends on its military, that can protect the accumulation of wealth at the top with every instrument of law and tax policy — that country can feed its people. The will is the question, not the capacity. And I will not stop talking about this until the people in that room have heard from someone who grew up on the other side of the door. “The American people are not broken. They are tired of waiting for permission to matter.” The Question That Changed Everything In the summer of 1969, I was fifteen years old and broke and alone in Los Angeles. I had fifty-three cents in my pocket. I did not know what the next day would bring. And somewhere in that uncertainty, a question came to me that I have carried ever since: What if you become president of the United States and change all this? I was a kid from Indianapolis with nothing. I had no reason to take that question seriously. But I have spent the fifty-seven years since then building toward an answer — through the Army, through fifty years of construction, through raising a family, through running for office, through reading and studying and refusing to let the experience of poverty become just a memory instead of a mandate. One in three Americans is skipping meals. I know what that house feels like. I know what that calculation costs. And I am asking, with everything I have, for the chance to be in the room when the next decision is made. Because I will not forget what hunger smells like. — About the Author Donnie Harold Harris is an Army veteran, retired construction worker, philosopher, and political candidate from Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the Unity Party of America's 2024 vice-presidential nominee and is a candidate for president. He can be reached at bigdonnie57@gmail.com or through his website at www.donnieharoldharris.com. Media inquiries: bigdonnie57@gmail.com 5 of 5

Me and you.

Most of my life has been me talking to myself. Words that have never left my head. Those thoughts are my good ones. You have rarely ever heard who I am.