Mr Jim I missed the line indicating that this was the woman’s regular behavior. Sorry.
Zensterumm thanks.
RexDart
The year is 1993. I’m majoring in psychology. I’m a member of the honors program. My teachers love me. My first semester gpa is a 3.85. The next semester is great. I feel like I’m charging down the path to my dreams. Then, something changes. The pills just don’t work as well anymore. I have to struggle to focus. It becomes harder to think. I have to study more and more to be able to remember less and less. I finish my fourth semester with a 2.0. Since then, I’ve been desperately searching for a pill or mix of pills that will let me go back to school or hold down a job.
I didn’t put myself in this situation.
Read the OP again. Notice that the woman has kids. They didn’t put themselves in that situation.
More[sub] I heard this on an episode of Mr Belvedere. It remains one of my favorite statements on morality[/sub] “Charity isn’t a bone for the dog. Charity is your only bone for the dog, when you’re just as hungry as the dog.”
The mother and father who have to feed their children from the neighborhood food bank deserve to be able to put more than cans cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie filling on the table.
No, you didn’t put yourself in that situation, and I sympathize with your situation. But unless every single one of those children was the result of a rape, then the woman did play a pretty major role in creating her situation. My point is that she is not just some victim of circumstance, she played a role. So if she’s going to accept public assistance then she should realize that she’s partly to blame for her situation and therefore should be thankful to be getting anything at all. The kids didn’t cause the problem, but it’s not their behaviour I’m critical of, they aren’t the ones trying to live like they aren’t poor and spending public money on luxuries.
On what theory do they deserve it? We might desire for them to have it, we might try to give them more, we may consider such an endeavor as providing for the unfortunate to be noble, but there’s nothing special about being born as a homo sapiens that entitles anybody to have the rest of the species give them food. Every other animal has to acquire its own food, and their population is limited by their ability to acquire that food. If there were an owl welfare system, and the owls who could hunt well were required to hunt for extra food to feed the owls who were bad hunters, then I’m sure there would be alot more owls around. But nobody out there is saying that an owl is entitled to food.
I’m in two minds about this. On one hand, I agree with you. No one in the world is entitled to anything. We get what we have because of battles that we fight or that we’re lucky enough not to have to fight because someone else has fought them for us.
On the other hand…while I have resisted with every fiber of my being having to go on any sort of public aid, I know that it is sometimes necessary. There are many, many people out there who abuse the system. One common way in an area I used to live in (dunno if it happens where I live now) was to collect welfare but have an unlicensed daycare center in your house. You would take care of the children of your relatives and neighbors, they would pay you, and you’d collect welfare income on top of that.
Using the food stamps to buy nonessential food was pretty common, too, but I don’t know if they were selling those steaks for diapers. Maybe.
Remember that the nice clothes the kids are wearing (or the parents for that matter) may not have been bought by them. I’ve found this especially true when the child’s mother is herself quite young…instead of buying food for the family, the grandparents will take the mom and kids out shopping and get them an outfit or three each. And Mom COULD sell those clothes, sure, but she’d rather her kids looked nice so they wouldn’t get the pitying or downright accusatory looks from people in the grocery line. She’d rather have clothes she can wear to a job interview.
This isn’t always the case. It probably isn’t often the case. But it’s a good way to think the best of people…
Or those nice clothes could have come from a charity. My kids outgrew their clothes so quickly that they still looked nice when it was time to donate them.
You know, this made me think of a toy drive that they had one Christmas at a place I used to work. People brought in scooting toys that were missing a wheel, or a doll with only one arm-- things like that. Some cheap new plastic toys were tossed in. When my boss gently told the people who wanted to donate these things that “gently used” meant not being broken, the givers became hostile and expressed sentiments that the poor oughtta be grateful for what they got.
Then, one man came in, and put a new Nintendo system with two games into the collection box. When asked about it, he shrugged and said that’s what he would have wanted if he were a kid.
The broken-toy contributors were upset. The parents will just sell the system, they argued. He just shrugged and said that he’d take that chance if it could possibly make some kid very happy. Even if the parents did hawk it, maybe some other underprivileged kid would get it.
In America, we have such hostility toward the poor. A lot of people think as the poor as immoral, lazy, hedonistic people as a whole. Many would advocate cutting off benefits to all in order to punish those who cheat the system.
But the reality is that it’s only a minority of the poor who do such things. They stick out in our minds because we’re so outraged, and thus there appears to be more of them. Hell, everyone’s got a story of a “welfare queen” they saw or knew. However, for every one of these examples, there’s at least ten families who are quietly struggling to survive.
Yes, there are bums who abuse the system. There are also crooked lawyers, incompetant doctors, and horrible teachers. They are no means the majority of these professions, just as people who cheat on welfare are not representative of the poor as a whole.
Hooray, Lissa! It irritates the crap out of me when people use the Salvation Army as a garbage dump. It isn’t only that people who have little to nothing are forced to walk around with stained, tattered clothing (making it more difficult to find a better job or better situation, as I believe has already been stated). The volunteers who work there have plenty enough work to do as it is, without having to weed out all the worthless crap, not to mention paying for the dumpster to dispose of it in (which they are sometimes forced to do). Although the woman in the OP sounds like she’s deliberately misusing the system, most people aren’t. It’s unfair for them to be lumped in with the few people who are truly horrible.
