Welfare and Privilege

Here's another article I wrote for one of my hall newsletters last year. It seems people enjoy that I'm posting these now. I'm good like that.

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I like Facebook. I use it a lot to keep up with friends and family back home, as well as for less useful and practical purposes (i.e. killing time and creepin’). It’s a great tool and one which I’m glad I can access. But it’s slowly becoming a stink-hole, isn't it? I can’t believe some of the crap I’ve seen come through my status feed. And it’s not just random junk generated by the ads, but junk which my friends seem to think is worthwhile. To wit: There are currently over 2.2 million people who are fans of the “Making Drug Tests required to Get Welfare” page. That’s nearly 200,000 more people than the largest “Support Same Sex Marriage” group. Awesome, right? Never underestimate the willingness of large groups of people to use their power in the worst ways.

I wonder — did it ever occur to these welfare-hating people that their whole argument is based on the one, flimsy, illogical assumption that all poor people are coked out of their minds as they stumble to their mailboxes to collect the free money handed to them by the government? Let’s forget that the vast majority of people choose not to use narcotics. Let’s also ignore the fact that drug tests don’t test for drugs like alcohol and tobacco (which cause more health and social issues across every class of person than do heavy narcotics). And finally, let’s choose to ignore the fact that the use of narcotics is a problem which transcends common definitions of social class. I’m sure that those of you who came here from “wealthy” private schools saw just as much drug use within your class as those of you who came from less affluent public schools.

The issue here is not that some (i.e. very few) drug users get free money... The real issue is that over two million people think it’s okay to discriminate against a whole class of people in our country simply because those people share the common, non-drug related characteristic of being poor. WTF?! “Well, Jim gets welfare so he must be super poor. And, don't you know, all poor people love shooting heroin all day long. I learned that from Fox News and the TV.” Meanwhile, your gramps and grams receive monthly Social Security and Medicare checks from the government (aka “welfare”) without having you join Facebook groups about them being likewise tested for drugs. And I guarantee you they take more pills everyday than do most moderate narcotic drug users. How else are they going to keep their diabetes in check, their hearts pumping, and their sex organs functional? The only difference, of course, is that we love our grandparents and wouldn't dare question their honesty and integrity when it comes to their consumption of the public dollar. Why can’t we seem to bring ourselves to have the same trusting care in the honesty and integrity of others who are going through tough times?

I don’t think the over two-million people who became fans of the drug-testing page are actually bad people who really, really hate poor people (though I’m sure some of them do). Rather, I think that they’re probably just people who haven’t taken the time to really think about their own social status deeply enough to realize that they’re more than likely privileged in one way or another. It’s easy to point the finger and make demands of welfare recipients when you yourself have never had to wonder how you were going to keep food on the table each month. It’s easy to demand drug tests of others when you know that you’ll never be in the position to have the same asked of you.

We make harmful generalizations about others when we haven’t yet taken the time to understand ourselves in relation to them. We need to be less willing to see the world solely through our individual experiences and opinions, and be more willing to see the world through the experiences of others. Walk a mile in their shoes, you know? We need to realize that sometimes we have privileges we haven’t earned and that we can’t expect others to pay a social cost simply because they haven't been so privileged.

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Stay Gold!

MMK