I’m saddened to hear of the straits you are in, truly I am.

I would like to clarify that no single statement can be reasonably meant to include every person and this entire series of comments is, at least from my view, generally geared toward the healthy and work capable.

It sounds to me like you are the outliers that the benefits of assistance were actually meant for. What those who didn’t protest a new tax had in mind when the taxes were created.

In short, my mom is just a couple of years older than your man and has serious problems, though not cosmetically visible. It makes her fear for her job security and her future too. But she knows she has us and always will so long as we have breath.

Do you have family? It seems you need some help and there is no shame in needing it when the body decides to go one way while we’re going another. None whatsoever.

I suppose that the other half of my argument is, where are the families? People with limited resources should live together. I’m among those who do think extended families sharing homes is the norm (5 generations in 1 house worked great while I was a kid, but it was a big house).

Every single person is different and not everyone is going to have the physical capability to do 3 jobs. Some people will be disabled.

I’m talking about your general person, in reasonable health.

And yes, sad, if he was a scientist in a field I was hiring for, I wouldn’t care what he looked like if he could do the job. You should see what some of the truly brilliant folks from Eastern Europe look like when they first get hired on here. And most don’t know about even deodorant.

“Where did they get those giant rocks?” said the young girl who was quite earnest and impressed by the size of the boulders strewn through the hils that lined the highway.
“They are there for landscaping to make it look nice so you will enjoy the casino.” was the equally earnest reply from her male companion stated assuredly to his impressed companion.

I was amazed and aghast. I did not correct them, they were having a great day and I did not think having this “fact” corrected would serve any purpose but it did make me wonder. This was even worse than the campers I used to be a counselor of not being able to connect the chickens we were seeing to the plastic wrapped pink meat their mothers brought home from the store.

Don’t leave this blog and don’t give up.

As for this comment:

ChristyACB said,
“Everyone can get themselves out of their own personal quagmire if they are actually willing to work.”

I see some degrees of truth to that, but getting out of quagmires can often require the help and assistance of others.

I’ve heard too much of the “I worked my ass off and walked four miles to school in the snow each day” so I deserve it bullshit. Guess what: the world is not fair. It never has been and it never will be.

Most people in the world work very hard just to survive from day to day.
A friend and co-worker of mine who is Indian and travels back and forth to New Delhi on business talks a lot about faith. In so many countries, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, so you absolutely rely on your faith. Much of the time, help is not just around the corner at the public assistance office-because there isn’t one.

Tell the people in Nigeria who are getting the crap kicked out of their land and fishing waters (from Shell oil) that they can “get themselves out of their own personal quagmire.” Yeah right. No, they can’t. Their livelihoods have been stripped from them.

Sad and mad, keep your head up. Find some other people who are sad and mad and be a source of strength and support for each other. That is what my family and I will do.

Bull. My 62-year-old works his fanny off for $8.50 an hour. That’s all there is available in my area. Scratch that! Right now there is nothing available. The jobs are gone and the numbers of unemployed keep going up.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume he could find another job. Would you hire a man who works harder than anyone I know but his eyes are bad and the money for the new glasses he needs is not in our budget? Could you look past how horrible his few teeth look and hire him anyway? No? You would instead hire the guy who previously had a decent job with health insurance, eye and dental care benefits and LOOKS good, wouldn’t you?

Or maybe you could think about hiring me. Right now we only have one vehicle so I would need a ride. No public transit here. If we could afford a car, I would still need a ride because I can’t pass the eye test to renew my driver’s license right now. I also desperately need new glasses. Bad teeth? I have those, too. Find me a dentist who will take reasonable payments and maybe we could fix that problem.

But wait. If I find a fix for all those problems, will you hire me once you find out that I have severe nerve damage which means my fingers don’t work very well and my arms are in constant pain? I drop almost everything I pick up. Will that be OK?

Our electric bills are going up. Our water/sewer bill is going up. Our property taxes are going up even though our property value continues its downhill slide. And, no, I can’t sell my house. Everybody and their brother is trying to sell around here. There are no buyers and my house isn’t in the greatest shape anyway. It costs money to make repairs. Not in the budget.

And, puh-leeez, no one tell me to cut out things we don’t need. We don’t buy ANYTHING we don’t need and, believe me, we skip some things we do need. I haven’t bought any brand new clothing in years and, sad to say, that includes underwear. Sorry if that’s too much information but maybe some people need to really understand what desperation feels like these days, not years ago when we/you were young. NOW.

We take nothing from the government or any charity. We pay our own way, all the way. So we are costing no one anything. No health care benefits here. Nada. I don’t go to the doctor. Can’t afford it. Hubby goes because we need to keep him healthy but we can’t really afford it.

So what’s next? Tell me to ditch the internet service and save money that way? I can’t afford to give it up. Right now the only small income I am able to add to our household comes from internet work. Should we give up our cable TV? Oops. We don’t have any. Long distance service? Nope, don’t have that either.

I don’t know why I bother. Does anybody want to “get it?” Probably not. This post is several days old so I’m likely talking to myself anyway.

Excuse me if I came off angry. I don’t want to be… but I am. And excuse typos, etc. I am not going to proofread this before I post it. I can’t see very well through my tears.

I’ve enjoyed your blog, Sharon, but I guess it’s time to delete it from my feed reader. It’s all too painful to read that some folks think we don’t work hard enough or made poor choices so maybe we deserve what we get. “Compassion” should be deleted from America’s vocabulary. There is so little of it left.

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1. More people can do it than have. 2. Everyone can’t – whether for health and personal reasons, because they have children or because they are lazy asses (which is not a category limited by class). 3. Most people don’t know how – even if they had the ability to do so.
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I think number 3 is the most limiting factor. Most of the time, people are lazy asses only because they have no meaningful goal. Here’s a real-life example – years ago I wrote an article on the effects gardens have on school children. Some of the parents of a local school had gotten together and turned an elementary school’s barren court yard into a paradise of a garden. As part of my prep work for the article, I interviewed some of the kids. One was a kid who had previously been labeled “learning disabled” or whatever the fashionable term was at the time. This kid, who had been scheduled to be moved to a “special needs” school, gave me a tour of the garden, naming all the plants. He was especially pleased to point out a chrysalis, from which, he explained, a Gulf fritillary butterfly could be expected to emerge. He had gobbled up knowledge in arithmetic (for example, he needed to be able to compute the number of cabbage seeds needed to plant a 12 foot row); botany; zoology. He told me, “I used to hate going to school. Now, every morning when I get up, I can’t wait to go to school.”

I see this same kind of thing in employees I hire for my business and in the small business owners who are my clients. It doesn’t work well, trying to make people into complacent machines. If you give people some leeway to set their own goals and follow them, people who used to seem stupid suddenly become smart; people who used to be lazy suddenly have energy.

Unfortunately, if people are trained their whole lives to be complacent machines, by the time they are adults, it is often very difficult for them to change, even if you show them how. This is one reason I’m really worried about what’s going to happen as the economic depression progresses. So many people have no clue what it means to create one’s own goals, to make decisions and carry them out.

Some will be so dissatisfied with poverty that they will knock themselves out to learn new ways of living. Those people would be exceptional in whatever social strata they started out in. The rest of them will struggle along doing the best they know how to do with the tools they have around them. Demanding that everyone pull themselves up by their bootstraps is like demanding that every woman suffering from domestic abuse should immediately get herself out of it. You have to come to the point where you can internalize that it’s possible to do so, whether the situation is abuse or poverty.

I’ve watched one family member on food stamps and in rent-assisted housing work every angle she could come up with to keep her family fed and sheltered, while others with her same education and background just went off every day to the jobs they assumed would always be there. Now the jobs have gone, and they’re helpless. The single mother who has always had to fight for every penny has skills that her more fortunate sisters and cousins never dreamed of, and she’ll figure out some way to manage the coming crisis too, while they wail for more bailouts and mortgage assistance. Being poor is never “noble.” But sometimes it does generate survival skills that you don’t get any other way.