When I was little, being a beggar sounded like the lowest level of misery to me. Today I get Ontario Disability Support Payments, because I have Asperger's Syndrome, so it's kind of like I'm a beggar after all.
One thing that makes me angry is the movement for welfare "reform." Some people want to imagine poverty as a moral problem and convince themselves that people don't really need welfare--just kick their ass and make them get a job!
One of the worst things that politicians have done, especially in the United States, is turn working people against the poor. I think it started after Rolling Stone magazine did a big 1988 poll of baby boomers. (Martin Luther King, the generation's most admired figure, was on the cover of that issue.) One thing they found was that the social issue that concerned this generation the most--even more than drunk driving!--was catching welfare cheats.
Sure, some people will try to paint the 1990s welfare reform as a success. Yet most of the people who found work at that time would have done so anyway. (Beware the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.) It resulted in millions of invisible victims, many of them children.
No comments:
Post a Comment