I once worked in Welfare, and I think I have a clue why people can be swayed by anti-welfare references and engage in identity politics (that is, vote for the party that disparages welfare and the people on welfare) even if they've been on welfare at one time or another themselves.
The closely knit welfare office where I worked served a rural community, which means one of my friends worked in child protective services, another in FoodStamps, and yet another in AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children).
What I want to talk about is people in general and some people specifically.
But before I begin I want to say that most of us thought welfare needed reforming but not in the way it has been reformed. Because frankly, the reforms reflect more what people think it means to live in poverty (what the challenges are and this can also be from the narrow frame work of when they needed assistance) rather than the reality on the ground. And the reforms and the programs themselves and often the people working in the agencies reflect the punishing attitudes we have toward "the poor."
And one last thing before beginning, there's seems to be this fantasy in the U.S. that we were all created equal. There seems to be no recognition that some of us have boots without straps and some of us have no boots. Indeed, some have no feet. But that never stops us from saying, "S/he should pull himself up from his own bootstraps." We never think of the Downs Syndrome person who is working full time at a job that does not pay a living wage, or the two jobs. (I could go on, but I'm hoping you get the picture.)
So I'm not just talking money here. I'm talking intelligence, I'm talking talent, I'm talking know how, I'm talking health, I'm talking cultural advantages that impart more than the person born into the middle or upper classes realizes s/he has by virtue of the fact of not having been born into poverty. I'm talking about what poor people do not know that they do not know. Yet, somehow because of the idea that anyone can grow up to be president or the head of a major corporation we saddle everyone else with that same expectation. If one can do it, surely everyone is at least capable of moving from poverty into the middle class existence we enjoy.
Think about that. How many middle class people have actually worked hard and pulled themselves into riches? How many more have worked hard and failed? How many people in the middle class have the health, the time, the capital, the know how, and the singular ability to focus on "making it" that gets them to make the switch from middle class to upper class? How many people don't get side lined by children, sick relatives, mentally ill family members, and other family obligations that take up their time? Or every day concerns like serving on school boards, helping out with the boosters, being a good neighbor, engaging in volunteer work, etc.
I have heard a lot of poorly thought out answers to those questions in my time. And it's not because middle and upper middle class people are stupid per se (bless their dear hearts), but it is because they are often ignorant of the poverty they don't know (however long-term or temporary it might be), the situation they don't know, the people they don't know. Often, they don't even know the people they think they know. And rural or city, pockets of poverty have their own unique challenges that many people are not simply not aware of, but I'm not going to talk about that here.
But I will say this: We tend to give ourselves an inordinate amount of credit for where we are or why we did not slide into poverty when this or that happened when we might not even think about how having been given an old clunker of a car set us apart from people who didn't get that advantage. (Just one tiny example of what can help set people on the road to a better future.)
About people in general:
It's embarrassing to ask for help. I can tell you that 99% of the people I met were embarrassed. And a good 98% of them were apologetic and wanted to somehow let me know why they were not like the other people on welfare. How their situation was different, temporary.
And for most of the people on welfare, it is temporary.
Roughly one half of those people would then talk about other people on welfare in a disparaging way. Yet another way to set themselves apart. What I heard is what I hear from politicians, from people who consider themselves pious Christians, from people who think they are of the world of hard workers and everyone else on welfare is not. Oh and could they point to specific people and tell me what they thought was going on in that persons's life... from the outside. They could make it very clear indeed that that OTHER person was not deserving.
(Not saying there was not fraud here or there, but fraud is not rampant even if the idea of fraud is.)
Trouble was, I knew the people they were talking about. I knew them from the inside over time. I'd been in their homes. I'd used their toilets.
About people specifically:
When you think of people on welfare, particularly people who might be have long-term reasons for long-term use, I'd like for you to think about the following people.
Aside from working in Welfare, I once ran a vocational program for single parents, homemakers, and displaced homemakers and while we were free to set up the parameters for help, most community colleges or centers where these were set up set them up for people on welfare. (One thing you can rely upon when it comes to middle class people... they are often lacking in imagination and vision... just like the rest of us.)
Luckily, though I'm not much when it comes to imagination, I had experience, and based on my experience, I knew that serving only people on welfare was a pretty stupid thing to do. (If you can't figure out why, PM me and all tell you because what follows is only a part of it.) I knew that at least up the the median income in the area where I was living that families were struggling. I also knew that there were a lot of abused women staying in situations that were bad for their kids because they lacked the education, the job training, and a job that would pay a living wage to leave. And so the program I developed helped every man or woman no matter their income even though the financial help we gave was graduated and reached up to the median income folk.
However, people at the community college believed that everyone associated with the program was on welfare and their attitudes and behavior too often reflected that. Despite making efforts to educate the educated community of staff and professors, we saw some very ugly behavior. You think the politics of division doesn't make a difference? Even among the educated elite, you know, them commie professor types, it makes a difference.
I want you to think of this woman: She was upper middle class or upper class. And like many of the well to do, SHE HAD A LOT OF KIDS RIGHT OUT OF COLLEGE. (Ever notice that about the rich, or at least the upper class or upper middle, unlike the lower middle or middle middle class? How many kids they have?)
Well this woman had four of kids right out of college and two of them were still under school age. It had been years since she had been in the work force, er, um, she had never been in the work force. She had her parents who were of modest middle class means, she had college where she got her MRS degree, and she had her husband. She was a homemaker. That was the marriage bargain she had struck with her husband like so many of her friends.
Then, her husband left, and while he was providing her with some money, it was not near enough to make ends meet. He had forced her and their children out of the home and into a small apartment. He had protected HIS money. He was a divorce lawyer.
She let me know her political beliefs right away. She had been born and bred conservative. She'd never voted for a democratic candidate, and she was one pissed woman at our government. She could not believe that despite the fact that she and her children were in desperate straights, that her parents were not in the position to support them (by now age and health had strapped them), that the government was telling her that she was getting too much money from her husband to qualify for money.
And they were desperate. She laid out her financial situation. She couldn't believe that I actually understood her situation. Her friends had distanced themselves from her because you know that bad times, like disability, are catching and well, a social embarrassment for all. It was her and her children who were the pariahs not the man who worked the system to his advantage.
She cried when she found out we'd help her get the skills she needed to get into the world of work.
Going back to my days working in welfare, I need to tell you that most of the people on welfare long term are old people and disabled people. But there are some people who don't fit that category, people who fit the stereotype. I met one once.
I'd gone to this family's home to do their regular Foodstamp assessment along with a co-worker who was an AFDC worker. They lived far out in the country with an unreliable car that had seen better days decades ago. The father was long-time disabled, old before his time. A nice gentleman. The mother was a wreck of a woman, worn down from years of raising kids and coping with and caring for a disabled husband. But they were no longer on AFDC. All of their kids had managed to get out and make something of themselves except one.
One daughter managed to get pregnant repeatedly and never leave home, and she made ends meet for her children, which she seemed to be doing a fairly good job of raising with the help of her mother, by receiving AFDC and living with her folks who could not afford to care for her and her children on their meager social security payments. What's a mother to do (speaking of her mother)? What would you do?
Well, I personally know a respectable middle class family where three of their four children managed to make it in the world but where the fourth, for some reason, managed to get pregnant four times and live at home with her parents. I don't know if she is on welfare or not. Either scenario is just as likely, though I would hope that her parents, if unable to get the bird to leave the home, would not burden the welfare system if they could afford not to. Judge them if you want.
Then, back at the vocational training program, I met a woman of 22 who had four kids. She'd started getting pregnant at age 15 by various men. She was a mathematical genius. I do not lie. We enrolled her in college. However, knowing the importance of ongoing contact and support, I came to realize after getting to know her over time that something was not right. (You'd think Schizophrenia and other mental illnesses would be evident on their face; trust me, I've worked in a psychiatric hospital too, and so I know a little something about that.)
She was never going to be able to complete her classes because she had some form of mental illness. Did the women in the other examples above also suffer from mental illness? You don't know and neither do I. This much I know, men have a way of taking advantage of women with mental illness and women with mental illness often engage in magical thinking, making birth control a very tricky thing indeed. (And you know, we're not keen in this country about abducting people and tying their tubes.)
I also know that when Reagan was in office he closed down most of our mental institutions with promises of cheaper half way houses. What can I say? You would not want to hear the string of curse words I could insert here. If you have not worked in the sectors I have worked or dealt with mentally ill family members (in a way that is not dismissive of them and ignores their very real challenges), then you don't know. You are ignorant. And that's okay, but keep your judgments to yourself while you go about educating yourself. And if you have no interest in educating yourself, then stop acting like you are such an expert on welfare and how people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
And prisons. Yeah that's right. Many of the people in prison today would have been people who would have been in mental institutions years ago or at least receiving some sort of mental health care.
Oh, that's right we don't have universal care. Silly me.
Rather than investing in preventive care and meds that might help people be productive citizens, we'd rather pay a system that has been privatized to house desperate people. We'd rather give good head, um, money hand over fist to the titans of our various prison systems. An approach that has us sitting at the top of the number of citizens incarcerated per capita. Go U.S.A! We're number one!!!
Then, there was the client who, though having escaped to a women's shelter (didn't I mention that I also volunteered for women's shelters and ran survivors groups and have even volunteered in a prison and have provided drug and alcohol rehab?), went back to her husband because, really, where were she and her kids to go? He beat her to death with a board in front of her children and got only a couple of years because, well, the children needed a parent to care for them.
And then there were the two elderly sisters that lived in a very large and respectable old house that fit very well in the nicest section of this proud little community. You could tell that this home had once been the residence of one of the wealthiest that that little community had. It was probably the home of a one time banker or lawyer. But that was another day and age and the house had seen better times even though from the outside it looked to be in good repair. An old time friend of the family had seen to that, giving very generously of his time. It was him who had alerted me to the fact that these old women needed Foodstamps.
When I arrived, one waif-like sister, like a specter, opened the door and then disappeared into the house. I followed a fleeting glimpse of her thin nightgown through a narrow walk created by five foot tall stacks of magazines dating back into the 40s. I guessed that she was directing me to the sister who was mentally healthy and capable of being in the same room with and speaking to another human being. And from all appearances, that was true.
The other sister lay there confined to her bed, with legs bowed, though encased with leather leg braces that were designed to hold back the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis. She greeted me warmly, in the genteel nature of a southern woman raised right. I set about to get the necessary questions answered. But I could quickly see that without the help of the friend of the family I was never going to get the documentation I needed to get them the help they needed (and I had no way of knowing if he would be able to do that). But I tried.
She wasn't trying to be difficult, but the conversation kept winding off into tangents. And well, as someone who is autistic and has ADHD, I know something about tangents and persistence despite distraction and so I hung in there. I figured that she was isolated and that it had been so long since she'd had a social visit.
And then she started asking me if I felt the bed wavering and rising off the floor (I'd sat on the edge of the bed because there was no where else to sit amongst the hoarding). She became quite agitated at the ghosts who were making her life miserable and the people who weren't doing anything to save her. What could I do? Where was the help for these old dears? All I could do, given who we are as a country, was work with the old time friend of the family. I've always wondered if he out lived them, and if not, what happened to them without his oversight.
Then there was Walker, a wonderful old gentleman who had, though part of the working poor, managed to have purchased a home and own it outright. He too could not drive due to advanced age and health. And given what he was living on, it was obvious why the inside of his home, though neat, appeared to be right out of the annals of poverty in America. He hadn't a penny to spend on upkeep.
At any rate, I had to cut Walker from the Foodstamp program. Turns out that he and his long deceased wife had purchased two grave sites many years before for them. She had donated her body to science. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, in an effort to cut down on fraud and get the undeserving off the welfare rolls, decided that year that one person could not own more than one grave site and still receive Foodstamps. One extra grave site was too much wealth. So Walker was left to figuring out how to get rid of a grave site in an economically depressed area that young people had given up on many years before.
Did you ever wonder who was white and who was black in the stories above? If you did, shame on you. Shame. On. You.
And then there are all those people who were on welfare temporarily. Going about their business and still thinking that their situation was different than most somehow. That they were deserving while others were not.
This helps explain--that is, if you are capable of seeing the bigger picture--some of the fun that the left has had with the right thinking "We built this."
We don't build anything in the world without the help of others. Not. One. Single. Thing. Ego tells us that we do.
Except, however, we do get to decide our attitudes, we get to decide what to make of the information we take in, to try to understand how culture and others try to shape our attitudes. And we get to decide, if people are worth the effort to understand why culture and specific groups within our culture in particular would try to shape our attitudes about others. We can look for the message behind the message. Or we can accept what we read and what others say and take it on as our own. Mostly, I believe, we do this unconsciously. I don't think any of us set out to be lacking in understanding or compassion.
With that said, we also get to decide whether we will be caring and compassionate in our dealings with others or whether we will be holier than thou and rude, buoyed up with cynicism about the poor. We get to decide if we are going to stand with those who would convince us of the poor's underserving nature, leaving us without much an obligation to care for our fellow human beings, much less maintain a sense of compassion, or whether we will stand with people for whom life has handed unfortunate events while truly understanding that little separates us from them. We can educate ourselves or we can defend ourselves and our positions. We can believe what we read, or we can suspend judgment and go out and find out for ourselves.
Did you know that that is how Arianna Huffington went from being a darling of the right to being a fixture of the left? She decided to prove to herself that she was right about the poor and so she went to a homeless shelter to volunteer (among other things). And there she found real people, with real lives, and with real stories. Much like herself. And she realized she'd been lied to and she'd bought those lies and she decided to do something about that.
But like with anyone who has a change of heart, the forces that support the status quo and need the poor as the boogie man found ways to dismiss her.
You're welcome to dismiss me and my experiences too.
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