Maggi Rogers drives a mail truck. She listens to talk radio as she drives. She knows it isn’t healthy but she needs to check in.

“It’s a conversation that’s going on,” she says.

But it’s a conversation that she and others feel shut out of. They feel they can’t get in their side — that those who belittle, demean and ridicule efforts to help the poor allow no informed response. Requests to present the other side on the air are ignored, she says.

It isn’t just the increasingly mean-spirited spew from the radio, though. That becomes little more than background noise in what has become a very hard, cold season for the poor. There are people doing serious damage beyond the yelp and snarl of the radio.

“They stole the money,” says Rogers, who, in addition to driving a mail truck and substitute teaching, serves on the leadership committee of the Rhode Island Campaign to Eliminate Childhood Poverty.

OK, so maybe it wasn’t actually, officially stolen. People know where the money is. But it isn’t where it used to be. The $15 million in the state budget to help the poor avoid utility shutoffs got diverted to cover other budget problems.

This is low. This is a hard, cold season getting harder and colder. There are thousands of families in Rhode Island currently shut off by their utility company. And it will get worse as winter comes.

So the people hurt by the legislative shell game headed up to the State House last week. It is almost ritual now, this confrontation at the State House, the doors of utility companies, the offices of the Public Utilities Commission. The poor get squeezed, and they and their advocates head for the places where the decisions are made. Last week, they included pictures of Al Capone and Jesse James in their protest. It was a little bit amusing, but the message was clear: You took money that was supposed to help us.

There was no one there who could respond in any meaningful way. The governor wasn’t there. The speaker of the House wasn’t, either. But the point was made. Too many Rhode Island residents are finding it impossible to keep the basic necessities in place. It really does come down to food or heat for far too many people.

“The poorer you are and the more desperate you are the worse it gets,” says Rogers.

Rogers tried to put herself in the middle of the process. She applied for appointment to the Public Utilities Commission. She and others who see the reality of shutoffs and budget cuts thought a little balance might be in order. But she wasn’t chosen, and the PUC remains two members short of its mandated five members. The governor has simply not made the appointments he is supposed to make.

When I saw The Journal’s story on the State House protest, saw familiar faces grimly holding the banner and making the case, I was reminded again of how tirelessly some people keep coming back to make sure that injustice is held up to public examination. It is an often lonely piece of work, greeted with an official indifference that has to be discouraging. But they keep doing it because they can’t not do it.

For Rogers, the effort began 15 years ago with the push for a school breakfast program in Pawtucket.

“My kids weren’t in school yet, but I decided it was time to get involved,” she said.

She keeps at it — pushing, protesting, trying to keep the reality of poverty in front of the people who need to deal with it. And right now, the reality is about utility shutoffs.

“On November 1, the shutoff ban begins and people think the heat gets turned back on,” she said. “But they still have to pay a percentage of their unpaid bill.”

And sometimes that’s impossible and the juggling of bills becomes a nightmare and a cold winter is not far away.

And now the state has pulled away what was a very thin safety net to begin with.

“Our successes are, in the short term, stopgap,” says Rogers. “And people often don’t know the protections they do have, how they can at least hold off a shutoff.”

People have a right to a hearing before a shutoff, for example. And in a residence where there is a child younger than 1 year old, shutoffs are prohibited by law.

Rogers says members of the Rhode Island Campaign to Eliminate Childhood Poverty have been talking with officials of National Grid to see if the options available to customers can be printed on the utility bills.

It would be a small step, but that’s how it’s done.

bkerr@projo.com