[Newspoetry] newpoem #.3

[Anne Bargar]

What I Do During Staff Meetings

Your average social service agency staff spends 20 minutes during a
meeting on whether
people are required to take a lunch.

Your average legal immigrant is legally denied access to food stamps.

570,000 legal immigrants were denied food stamps in 1999.
If you do the math (3*570,000), since the 1996 Welfare reform bill,
1,710,000 people have been denied food stamps simply because they were
immigrants.  

We talked about taking a lunch a lunch for at least three meetings, at
roughly 20 minutes apiece, so thats (3*20) 60 minutes, if you do the math.  

This means that, if you have an opportunity to do some recreational
mathamatics, you might figure out that (60*24*365) there are 520,600
minutes in a year.  So, if we proceed to look at the math done
recreationally during the discusssion that didn't even apply to you, (and
is therefore not guarrenteed to be acurate), that's roughly 1 immigrant
denied food stamps per minute.  That means that 60 immigrants were denied
food stamps while we sat around and talked about taking a lunch.