System errors

Warning ... Lonnnngggg post ahead.

The thread about obesity and its connection to poverty has just been bugging
the *** out of me and I haven't been able to figure out why. My instincts
tell me it isn't true. It just makes no sense to me. I did some research of
my own and yes, I found several articles that talk about the connection ...
but then you can always find articles that talk about some sort of
connection, can't you? The way I look at it, people can make any case they
want -- statistics can be slanted any way the statisticians want. And people
read it and people buy it as if it were fact. "The poor dears!" they say.
"We must do something! We must!"

The fact is, in today's American world, people need someone or something to
blame for everything from not being able to afford insurance to being 100
pounds overweight to having health problems to not being able to find apples
in a store. They're obese and unhealthy, their kids are obese and unhealthy,
but it's not their fault -- heaven forbid they should accept responsibility
for their own fucking lives and their own fucking problems. "It's the food
producers' fault!" "It's the advertising's fault!" "It's the fault of the
government for not providing transportation!" "It's the fault of our
government for not educating people enough about the hazards of becoming
fat!" "It's the fault of my neighborhood because there's no grocery store
with fresh cumquats!" It's everybody's fucking fault but theirs.

Where the hell does personal responsibility play into this? Yes, absolutely,
sometimes things are out of people's control. But the really, truly
downtrodden people I've known throughout my life are, amazingly enough, the
ones who rarely complain. The ones who never assign blame. They just bust
their asses to do the best they can with what they have.

Now Josh, I know you're reading this, and you talked earlier about people
who are genuinely poor ... people who are truly deserving. And I, for one,
want those people to get all the help they need. The problem is, there are
too many people in this country who say they are in need and are not --
people like the college student I talked about several weeks ago who was
losing her welfare insurance and whining about it instead of figuring out
how to support herself. The fact is, the system has created this mentality.
And the other fact is, the system canNOT support every single person who has
some claim to being down on his or her luck because that applies to such a
massive percentage of the population. And because there are so many people
who make that claim (and so many like you who defend them no matter what)
the undeserving are sucking the life out of the system ... and the most
egregious problem is, the damned system lets them do just that. The result
is that the truly deserving people lose out.

You want an example? I was at the grocery store last week and there was a
man paying for infant formula with WIC coupons. I looked up WIC on the Web
and here's what it said: "WIC serves to safeguard the health of low-income
women, infants, & children up to age 5 who are at nutritional risk by
providing nutritious foods to supplement diets, information on healthy
eating, and referrals to health care." Sounds like a wonderful program,
right? A way to provide milk and formula and other nutritious foods to poor
women and children. But the man I saw? He looked perfectly able to work, was
dressed in nice clothes, and certainly didn't look down on his luck, so I
wondered about him a little. Then he spoke up, kibitzing with the cashier.
"Hey, this WIC program is great," he bragged, far from quietly. "I found out
that if you have 2 children within 2 years, no matter how much money you
make, you can still get WIC coupons. The way I look at it, that's $150 more
per month I can spend on beer!" Yes, he said those exact words, and after
hearing them, I felt like bloodying his system-sucking nose.

That kind of unmonitored ***, that attitude of entitlement and "I'm a
victim therefore I deserve this because ..." is exactly why there is not
ample money to help the elderly, the truly poverty-stricken, and others who
really need help and deserve it.

~ ~

PJ





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