I’ve returned from self-imposed apathy; part of it was that, to be honest, the Iranian situation overwhelmed me: the violence, the coverage, etc. It also let me take a break, because, quite frankly, there wasn’t much else on the news besides that and I didn’t really have much to add.
I’m back now, and with an interesting piece by Barbara Ehrenreich, who’s been focusing on the economic recession and the effect it is having on families. The latest piece is on a family and their struggle to receive any sort of benefits from the government. The family and the situation strikes me another creation of a political movement that has spent the last forty years trying to convince you that welfare is evil and that the only thing that matters is your bank account:
Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente, Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to government for help only if “they didn’t want to work.” […]
Not until March did the Parentes begin to receive food stamps and some cash assistance. Meanwhile they were finding out why some recipients have taken to calling the assistance program “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the experience has been “humiliating,” Kristen said. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum — they act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”
It’s no secret that the temporary assistance program was designed to repel potential applicants, and at this it has been stunningly successful. The theory is that government assistance encourages a debilitating “culture of poverty,” marked by laziness, promiscuity and addiction, and curable only by a swift cessation of benefits. In the years immediately after welfare “reform,” about one and a half million people disappeared from the welfare rolls — often because they’d been “sanctioned” for, say, failing to show up for an appointment with a caseworker. Stories of an erratic and punitive bureaucracy get around, so the recession of 2001 produced no uptick in enrollment, nor, until very recently, did the current recession. As Mark Greenberg, a welfare expert at the Georgetown School of Law, put it, the program has been “strikingly unresponsive” to rising need.
What strikes me as important from this piece of the culmination of two national processes: the continued propaganda against those that are on welfare and the ‘protestant’ work ethic that has made capitalism more than simply an economic system in the United States.
The problem lies in our inability to conceive of individuals using government as little more than a nuisance, a necessary condition to ensure that people don’t starve and that children have some semblance of assistance. This is compounded by the simple fact that in the US, self-worth is attached to ability to work and to engage in self-dependence, disrupting one from the communal milieu that could potentially help during a time of need.
Thus, our governmental assistance agencies treat you like a criminal; they discourage you from applying – they do anything but help to ensure that families are able to give their children a healthy chance at a decent life, because doing that would just encourage individuals to milk the system. I’ve seen the tears of individuals looking for assistance, the humiliation they suffer when the gaze of the worker meets their down-trodden eye, the double-look you get that speaks not of compassion but disgust.
In an ironic twist, the very country that establishes the workman-ethos admits to its very potential failure, even with it usually doesn’t: most people do want to work, want to provide sustenance and a better life. It would lead to an true societal disturbance if it actually didn’t happen. Instead, millions toil for a chance; all they need is a little help, to which many simply spurn.
What actually needs to happen is simple: we need to stop demonizing those for whom circumstances out of control have let them to need; work should not be the most meaningful way to attribute societal value and self-worth and government assistance should not be considered a crutch for a lazy but as the second word says: assistance. It’s time that Americans realize that assistance is not some failure of the individual but the very essence of our shared human condition: that we are not products of ourselves alone, but raised and exist within common bonds to our fellow man.
Quite simply, in a time of economic recession, there will be many who cannot find a job and no amount of cajoling is going to make it better; our assistance agencies need to provide it with care and human decency and job training must be the highest priority, not job placement. Children need to be healthy, families need to be supported and the ability of welfare needs to lie in providing support, not shame.
There is nothing shameful about being unable to make on your own. We need to ensure that our society recognizes this too.
Rather interesting. Has few times re-read for this purpose to remember. Thanks for interesting article. Waiting for trackback