This is why I know I would make a lousy politician: I can see way too many sides of a given issue, and it virtually paralyzes me.

Take the issue of grocery store plastic bags, which last time out here, I ranted about ad nauseum.

I still hate them, believe them to be a horrible, ugly blight upon this earth and, from here out, will make every effort never to fill my hands with them.

And then you talk with someone like Sarah Norton, a kind and caring woman clearly performing the Lord's work, who rises up and slaps you with a heavy dose of reality.

She runs the Friends of St. Andrew food pantry and outreach program at Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Aurora.

Each day the program feeds nearly 200 people in its soup kitchen and hands out some 20 food baskets to the city's poor.

In the business of handing out the baskets, Sarah Norton estimates volunteers use as many as 200 plastic bags a day, or better than 1,000 a week.

"I'm not saying I don't understand pollution and environmental concerns - I consider myself an environmentalist," she said. "But we couldn't survive or operate without those plastic bags."

She did not call me an idiot, though I must tell you she was within her rights. No, she just said a lot of well-intentioned folks simply do not fully understand what she is up against and what is needed to serve those who are the neediest among us.

She would love, she said, to switch out the plastic she uses for the cloth grocery bags rapidly becoming fashionable among the city's environmentally conscious set. For her, it is just not an option.

"We're a nonprofit," she reminds.

She runs me through her typical day.

More than half of the people who walk through the door looking for food, Sarah Norton said, have no transportation.

"I'd love to sit here all day and hand out cloth bags, but you have to remember we are dealing with a very transient population here, people who are never able to keep up with the little they own, who are always losing it or having it taken from them," she said.

And sure, she could load the food into the cardboard boxes they have lying around the pantry, but what good would that be for a mother with kids in tow, who must walk back to the bus that brought them there?

"The small children take a bag or two, and she carries the rest. It is just the way it works," Sarah Norton said.

And can you imagine, she continues, what would happen if they were all carrying cloth bags? How many would return with them? Exactly how many would she ever see again?

The plastic bags she hands out are not the pristine, neatly folded kind you see in grocery stores. The 1,000 she hands out every week come to her secondhand, Sarah Norton said, either from donations by volunteers, church members or those who have returned what she handed out days earlier.

It is, she said, a reflection of the current mentality among those who care a whit about helping the poor: Make full use of anything and everything.

The number of people coming to the pantry and the soup kitchen seeking help are up by at least 15 percent since September. Food basket giveaways have jumped from 15 daily to 21 now.

Those coming for a hot bowl of soup or casserole serving, plus fixings, now total 199 on average, compared with about 150 five months ago.

"Stressed, is how I would characterize what we are doing these days," Sarah Norton said. "We are seeing so many more first-timers - families where one or both parents have lost a job, people who are choosing between paying the rent or the mortgage and buying food.

"We're seeing people we have never seen before. These folks you can tell right away. They are confused, hesitant, people who don't know the rules or the system. You can tell by their demeanor."

They are the people caught in food stamp hell, she says, not out of work long enough for the system to serve them right away, people forced to wait weeks for help to feed their children.

"Some you can tell are just embarrassed for being here," said Sarah Norton, who has been program director for seven years. "Others will flat tell you they are embarrassed, that they are sorry for being here.

"I tell them not to feel that way, that it's what we are here for."

It is all happening at a time when businesses have cut way back by at least 25 percent on their giving, she says, a period that explains why her shelves these days are growing more and more bare.

"The last time it happened was just after 9/11. Back then, you felt like you could see an end in sight. This time, we don't know where we are headed, and not at all sure of when or how it will all work out."

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