Gee, the trees are gorgeous this year. Autumn in Maine: my favorite time in my favorite place. Even with this year’s unseasonable warmth, some things about fall never change.

For example, different charitable organizations and broadcast do-gooders will soon start encouraging us to dig deep in our pockets and reach farther back in our cupboards to help feed our neighbors.

The fundraising gentlemen addressing Ebenezer Scrooge in the holiday classic “A Christmas Carol” summed up this year-end generosity when they said, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

But, unlike the heartless flinty Scrooge, we don’t need four visiting ghosts to turn our hearts. We know better and help each other willingly.

How remarkable that 160 years later the tragic necessity of begging for the less fortunate is still with us. And while most of us don’t respond – at least not literally – with Scrooge’s retort, “Are there no prisons?” it does seem disquieting that our genuine seasonal concern for our neighbors doesn’t compel us to understand their lives a little better.

For example, we donate because the Good Shepherd Food Bank tells us – and deep down we know – that “one in three jobs in Maine doesn’t pay enough to cover the basic needs of a family of three.” And consequently “more than 40 percent of Maine kids under the age of 12 show some signs of hunger” meaning “19,375 Maine children are hungry.”

Heck, with statistics like that, Mainers don’t need the do-gooder broadcasters telling them anything; more than a third of the state already lives this Dickensian reality.

So, when the Salvation Army kettle drive begins or the local disc jockey pulls some wacky publicity stunt near the mall, most every Mainer will not only help out, but will empathize as well.

I guess that it’s this perceived grasp we have on the cruel realities of our neighbors’ lives that contributes to my confusion this week. The recent shock wave caused by the Portland school board’s decision allowing a public health clinic to provide contraceptives at its King Middle School location seems inconsistent with our supposedly heightened awareness.

Are we really so subjectively naive? I mean, really, we can taste the hunger felt in the belly of a child, but we can’t imagine the disadvantage – even torment – she may experience in the other parts of her life?

And it doesn’t have to be a poor kid; I knew a rich kid who grew up and years later told us, her closest friends, about her father’s nocturnal wanderings. They began a week after her first period ended; she had just turned 11.

But hey, as long as we’re focusing on the sex life of somebody else’s 12-year-old – ’cause of course it isn’t your kid that needs birth control – let’s learn a little more about them from the Maine Middle School Youth Risk Behavior Survey Results compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sixteen percent of Maine middle school kids have engaged in sexual intercourse. We don’t know how much of that was consensual. Four percent of these kids admitted having sex before they turned 11. Hey! Forty percent of Maine kids are hungry; maybe that’s what they’re doing with their unused lunch time!

Want more stats on the kids who aren’t yours? According to the Maine Kid’s Count 2005 report, 5,364 kids in our state were victims of domestic assaults reported to the police.

Oh, and by the way, our teen suicide rate is still about 47 percent above the national average.

Hunger is only a consequence of poverty, but we give enthusiastically.

Yet, when a clinic tries to help young girls avoid pregnancy, society gasps, points fingers at the health care providers and resists taking measures to reduce this disastrous consequence. How sad. See, at a clinic, kids with lives more horrible than you can imagine have another caring adult within their reach.

You know the kids in Maine need you – that’s why you donate food – but they need you to take your head out of the sand.

Pat LaMarche of Yarmouth is the author of “Left Out In America: the State of Homelessness in the United States.” She may be contacted at PatLaMarche@hotmail.com.