COLUMN LEFT/ JANNA MALAMUD SMITH : Heeding the Telltales of a Failing Crop : The worsening straits of the poor in America bespeak a government that doesn’t care.

Someone once pointed out to me in Italy that the farmers planted rose bushes at the end of each row of grape vines. At first I thought this was a charming example of Italian aesthetics. Not at all. Rose bushes are even more sensitive than grapevines to the mildew that can destroy a harvest. The bushes are planted to serve as telltales, to warn farmers so they can mobilize to save the vines.

So too, the patients with whom I meet in our neighborhood clinic manifest the harm of bad economic and social practices before the rest of the society does. Because their situations are more precarious, their well-being is more easily destroyed. But lacking the common sense of farmers, our government ignores these people, dehumanizes them, isolates them and implies that their difficulties stem from their own failings rather than any larger social problems. “The government doesn’t care,” observes one of my clients, and it seems that she is right.

One of the advantages of working for the past dozen years as a psychiatric social worker in a neighborhood clinic is that I have had the opportunity to get to know many poor people. I know them intimately, and for years at a time. Some are working poor, others cannot work, and scrape by on Aid to Families With Dependent Children, supplemental security income or general relief. Over the past year or so, as the recession has settled in, their circumstances have become worse. And since they had so little to begin with, this deterioration has been sad to behold.

Food stamps no longer keep pace with food costs, and few of my clients can make it through a whole month without running out of food. Sometimes they get flour or canned goods from the free-food pantry so they can eat something on the days when they’re broke. Sometimes a friend will feed their kids along with her own. The worry alone makes a hard knot in the belly and summons terror--often childhood memories of times when there was not enough food and they feared they might never eat again.

I make a home visit and sit with a mother and children who have nothing to eat. The mom laughs a subdued and rueful laugh. She quit doing drugs more than a year ago so she could take better care of her kids. As soon as her check comes, she pays bills, buys groceries and that’s it--there is nothing left. She tries to save enough money so she can buy more groceries when they run out toward the end of the month, butt something more important always comes along. A child needs a few dollars for a school field trip, or tears a pair of pants, or something. Always something. And the food money is the only discretionary money the family has.

Another client comes into the clinic. We begin by checking to see if this is the week she needs to go back into the hospital. She’s been on the edge of a psychotic breakdown since her boyfriend lost his job a few months ago. She’s too ill to work right now, but instead of being able to focus on recovering, she is deteriorating. It’s the pressure of bills, hunger and looming homelessness.

The next day I meet with a woman who has recently became more depressed. It seems that the recession has dealt her 40-year-old son a tough blow. He had brought himself back from heroin addiction, alcoholism and homelessness, and was one term short of a college degree. He’d been attending school faithfully, working hard and doing well, but just when he was in sight of his goal, the funding for his program was cut. His mother fears he is so discouraged that he will return to his addictions, or worse.

Name an issue: housing, day care, education, job security, health care. The difficulty of achieving a secure life is increasing--not just for the poor, but for the working class and the middle class as well.

The problems that now make misery for the poor will haunt us all before long. Only by aggressively fighting to ease the lot of those most at risk will we preserve our own futures.

Any Italian farmer would know that.