Musings on Charity, Dependence, Independence, and Entitlement

I grew up a victim of federal charity.  

Yes, I said that exactly how I meant it.  

Mom had food stamps.  It was the '80s/90s.  She got $285 per month of food stamps.  Actual stamps--the government, food-only cash counterfeit.  Came stapled in bundles of twenties, tens, fives, and ones.  She had to tear them carefully out of the booklets and give over as exact of change as she could.  She normally paid just under and made up the extra with coinage.  Because we didn't get change back.  Not at first.  The rules didn't permit for it.  Just like the rules didn't permit for the food stamp money to buy anything but food.  

And that was a good thing.  When the rules changed for people to be able to get change back?  People started going in, buying the bitty packs of gum, one at a time, a dollar at a time, and getting change back.  Real money that would buy cigarettes, beer, or whatever.   

And believe me, fraud was rampant.  People paid drug dealers in food stamps.  Which then meant that the dealers didn't have to use cash to buy their own food.  Yes, I saw it happen.  More than once.  Usually on the back steps of the income-based government duplexes.   

Wanna know what else you couldn't spend food stamps on where I grew up?  Convenience foods.  Junk foods.  Luxury foods (steaks--except bottom round, because that wasn't really edible without a lot of work--roasts--beef and pork--boneless chicken). Not because it was against the rules, but because the cashiers wouldn't ring them up for food stamps customers.  There was one rancid old bitch that wouldn't ring up packaged ground beef, either. 

And you'd better believe that everyone knew who got food stamps.   

You know something?  People (who weren't in our situation) worked to get off food stamps with that kind of difficulty and limitations.  

Most of the meat I had through childhood came from church-supplied food banks.  So did cheese.   So did boxed mac and cheese.  

Also, we got boxes with the gawd-awful USDA white-label crap that the government gave away: potato flakes that congealed, big boxes of American "cheese" that was so awful I'd never had anything nearly so bad (until I met Velveeta), bags of dry beans, and rice, and limp canned veggies.  

We didn't starve, but we wouldn't have eaten well.  Not if Mom hadn't known how to cook from scratch.  Most of the food stamps we got got spent on milk, bread, flour, potatoes, the meat the people at the registers would ring up, sugar, eggs, baking powder, baking soda, yeast, lentils, brown rice (which we never got in the boxes of charity food), and other dry staples.  

But Mom did know how to cook.  She could take bottom round and turn it into country-fried steak, or really anything she could think of.   I ate a lot better than most of my classmates who were also on food stamps.  

Wanna know what I didn't learn?  

I didn't learn where it came from.  I didn't learn why it wasn't fair for Mom to get that, didn't learn why Mom was wrong when she groused that food stamps didn't cover soap, shampoo, toilet paper.  

I did learn that I wanted to get the hell off of food stamps.  And I did.  All the way off.  We've never gotten them.  Or WIC.  Not even when my other half wasn't employed, and we had a toddler and an infant.  

Now, government charity traps people.  In the name of "removing stigma" so that "more people that need help can get help," the people that run the programs have made victims.  They've created a perpetual underclass.  Because the way the programs work?  Yeah.  It encouraged dependence on the programs, and penalizes any attempts to get off the programs in question.  The only people willing to put up with that are grifters who never had any intention of being honest, and often didn't really need the help to begin with.

And the people who desperately need help?  They often aren't getting it.  Because of how government charity is set up, it rewards the people who moan, wail, and perform "need" that they don't actually have.  There absolutely are people who do need help.  They, by and large, don't get it.  Most of them suck it up, tighten their belts...and slowly sink.  Debt and despair.  

These are the people who, a hundred years ago, their entire parish/congregation would have known who they were.  They'd have had help.  Often quiet help, and often without asking.  Neighbors holding each other up until they can get their feet back under them.   

But that's in small towns; in larger areas, the help took longer to manifest, and had more strings attached.  It was, however, still there.  And it didn't encourage continued dependence, not like current government funded charity does.   

The church I've been going to for a while now...they're doing a lot of charity work.  Almost none of it is local.  The money they raise goes overseas, to buy playground equipment for orphanages in Africa.  Not to buy groceries for local food banks.  Not to pay into local charities that pay utilities bills for people who get injured working and can't work for a while.  

That's...I mean, it's admirable to buy things for underserved children in underserved nations, but our kids here need stuff first.  

Right now.  

And we can't afford to do both.  

Not as a church...and not as a nation.