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I'm neither a bleeding heart nor socialist bozo. I flunked moral literacy in both classroom and practicum, and I am lexicon-challenged.

But I know that having one's back against a wall by being denied access to food constitutes an emergency, and after a certain point, desperation may drive criminal enterprise just to keep body and soul together.

But according to the Trump administration, exerting political leverage and vexed by pleas to release Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds during the government shutdown, feeling famished, though not quite starving, may qualify as a plight, but not as an emergency.

That middle state of hunger is due solely to court decisions mandating at least partial SNAP payments. The feds argued that opening the spigot of subsistence would require diversion of assets from a special account held in abeyance for a true case of need, such as a November tsunami in Kansas.

No doubt there are able-bodied people who prefer not to work and instead choose the more lucrative exploits of parasitism. Like lampreys slurping the taxpayers' blood, they do so in order to underwrite their Dodge Chargers.

But having done little to chasten them thus far, this is not the time to start, especially since policymakers persist in perhaps willfully confusing them with the preponderance of SNAP recipients who have, without pause, pursued with good faith and seized every legitimate opportunity to "better themselves" within the system.

Would national character be weakened by institutional empathy or fortified by resuscitated debtors' prisons?

Americans owe approximately $220 billion in medical debt. Around 100 million are in the hole because of consortiums of health-service racketeers.

Will there be a parade to celebrate the collectors' confiscations? A ballroom named after nouveau indigent martyrs?