New Book Review: If You See Them

NaNoWriMo poem? Why not?

If you see them, you might think they're

Dirty, lazy, sneaky kids,

And they certainly won't tell you

What the situation is--

Steal a cheap roll-on deodorant?

Sleep at friends' house for a week?

Wash their feet in library bathroom?

See the tips of icebergs peek...

I think this study of "them," the neediest kind of homeless teenagers, is one of a half-dozen books of which I received Advance Review Copies from publishers shortly before the storm damage forced me offline; all those books were then lost among the already published Booktober Blitz book, and all I can do about it is try to do better now. I am grateful to Spiegel & Grau for sharing this book with me, and wish I'd come to it sooner...

Title: If You See Them

Author: Vicki Sokolik

Date: 2024

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

ISBN: 978-1-954118-49-2

Quote: "These youth are like youth anywhere who aren't safe in their homes, or who have no homes, and have made difficult choices in order to survive."

That's what some readers will hate about this book. 

Because what I didn't like about this book is stated so clearly at the beginning, let me start praising it with the faint damns. I'm not doing this because I think the book deserves condemnation. I'm doing it because I think the book, and the local program it introduces to readers, are very valuable for some people and need just a bit of improvement to be more valuable for more people.

The characters in this book are generic, reduced to a lowest common denominator and a single storyline. Generic characters are boring. Writers might as well just make their general statements. While Sokolik tells us that these are the stories of real teenagers who worked with the program she runs, succeeded, came back to encourage others, have remained her friends, and gave permission for their real given names to be used, there's a flatness about the stories, as compared with stories about problem students in Jeff Hobbs' Children of the State. 

This is unfortunate. While unconsciously revealing the inadequacies of Sokolik and her program, this program promotion calls attention to a situation that really exists, and deserves attention. That I fell asleep three times while reading this book, even while knitting, calls my attention to a relatively simple shortcoming in a valuable document. It completely erases my kind of people.

Jeff Hobbs and the problem students who told him their stories in vivid, personal, though also blur-able detail, were introverts. Vicki Sokolik and the problem students she was able to help are extroverts. She does not merely show this in describing their conversations. She specifically celebrates their extroversion as if it were a virtue.

Maybe that's consistent with her discussion of a cringeworthy lecture about gender-confused youth, through which everyone apparently was required to sit. Sokolik brought in and apparently managed to listen to a lecturer who told her, her students, and other adult volunteers in her program, how calling people with normal, consistent sex characteristics "cisgender" supposedly "normalizes" gender-confusion and makes people who have it feel included...

Stop it, I think. This is so misguided. Does anybody not know how it feels to be "minoritized," even bullied, because of a medical condition we did nothing to choose or create? If the 9,999 of 10,000 people even in Ireland who happen not to be diagnosed celiacs started introducing themselves with "Hello, my name is Tracy Smith, and I'm gluten-tolerant," what would that do for celiacs? In the long run, probably nothing. In the short run, being told they needed to say that kind of thing might make people resent those who can't participate in food-sharing rituals more than they do. It may be something some of us thought we might want, it may be a kindly intentioned gesture, but it's not actually helping.

Despite the damage undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or glyphosate-aggravated celiac disease does, the celiac trait has good as well as bad qualities. A majority of all celiacs are hardy, healthy people who can be stronger and live longer than average, simply by giving up social eating. Given, for the sake of argument, that gender confusion is also genetic (only some of it really is; never mind) and also has good qualities...gender confusion is, like the celiac trait, primarily a dysfunctional condition. Inability to reproduce is a dysfunctional trait. It doesn't need to have attention called to it--women reacting to the same physical influences in the way that appears first, across species, certainly don't go around proclaiming to the world "I'm barren and I'm proud! Other women need to self-identify as 'breeders' to show due respect to me!"--but, if attention is called to it, no benefit is gained by pretending that the dysfunctional trait is the norm.

But Sokolik subjected her whole organization to an hour or so of terribly trendy blather about how we should all try to pretend that gender confusion is so "normal" that it's natural to invent a special word for the majority and hateful to ask whether people are male or female. I might not mind this being discussed at the length it is, in the book, if it had been matched by equal sensitivity and "inclusiveness" toward introversion, which is a normal, functional, altogether desirable trait. It's not. 

The only specific reference to introverts in this book is mildly disparaging; someone's mother's introversion (as distinct from other people's prejudice against it) is blamed for her general lack of success in life. That by itself wouldn't ruin the book but there's a total lack of awareness that, while the problem students Sokolik found easiest to help may have found it difficult to sleep alone, other students' primary survival needs include at least a room and preferably a garden of their own. There's no mention of a student who has any special talent being helped by the program. There's no mention of how the yappy horde were sensitized to other people's valid, normal, natural needs for quiet, privacy, and personal space. There's no consideration of how the therapy-group exercises Sokolik's program offers teenagers as "classes" can harm some teenagers, or why they've been banned from the regular public school program as constituting Child Abuse in the Classroom.

So, Sokolik has extroversion. That's not something she chose or could help; that's a valid reason why the problem students who bonded with her and were helped most by her all seem to suffer from extroversion too. Extroversion is at least a more common dysfunction than gender confusion, or celiac disease, or cleft palates. It's like cardiovascular disease, or clinical depression; not really part of the majority human experience, but widespread enough that everyone at least knows someone who has it. Most of us even know someone who doesn't have the actual condition but has been miseducated to think person has it. (People used to think that extroversion was the same thing as self-confidence in social situations. It's not.) People tend to bond with, and help, others who are like themselves. When lots of attention is directed to the differences, that may actually help people "reach across the gaps" between young and old, male and female, Black and White. When the differences are poorly understood, the gaps are less likely to be bridged.

Extroversion is a condition produced when the brain fails to develop a clear internal sense of right and wrong, usually also fails to develop a specific talent, may also fail to develop academic intelligence, and, even if academically intelligent, shows a hasty, shallow pattern of thinking and relating to others, which can also cause dysfunctional family life. Extroverts can be described as more or less affected; clearly they're not normal. Still, just as some of the most horrible genetic diseases are caused by inheriting two copies of a gene where one copy provides resistance to other fatal diseases, just as the celiac trait is associated with hardiness and gender-confused people don't overpopulate and people with Downs Syndrome are often described as loving and lovable, mild and well controlled extroversion can be considered an asset for some kinds of jobs. Extroverts don't know when they need to rest and clear their minds from external input, and while this can lead to breakdowns and is the most likely reason for their shorter life expectancy, it can also help them reach out to help one another. It works for the people whose stories are told in this book.

Sokolik presents herself in this book as Tampa's counterpart to Mildred Wolfe in Orlando: an oil-rich Texan who came to Florida, saw a local need, and set about using her money to meet the need. She adopted a homeless adult first and, after putting the young lady and her children in a nice house, had the reward of being told, "You've done so much for us...now go and help someone else." While she was still thinking about that, her teenaged son brought home a school friend who turned out to be homeless. 

The general category of "homeless teenagers" includes runaways who just aren't getting along with their families. Often the best help for them is encouragement to be reconciled with their families; they still have homes. However,  a minority of homeless teenagers fit into a subcategory the government currently calls "unaccompanied homeless youth." In government policy jargon this means that for all practical purposes these teenagers have no parents or homes to go back to. Their parents may be dead, in prisons or hospitals, insane, homeless, or just utterly unwilling to rear them. Sometimes a living parent is married to someone who doesn't want stepchildren. Sometimes a living parent is a drug addict who has used the child as a drug runner or dealer until the child runs to a different city to survive, or an abuser who has raped, prostituted, or violently attacked the child. In one family Sokolik met, the younger children had been placed in foster homes, but the teenager was apparently considered old enough to live on her own, possibly by a newbie social worker who didn't realize that the law considered teenagers differently. In another family the teenager had tried to protect the mother from an abusive stepfather, and the mother had thrown him out in the belief, which nobody else doubted, that the stepfather might kill him.

Even while her parents were losing their wealth, Sokolik tells us, she found her vocation in learning to "see" these teenagers who want very much not to be "seen." She had to warn one youth, "I don't have a money tree in my yard," but she and her husband were blessed with enough money to put the teenagers in apartments until they could renovate and organize a group house.

In the past, truly homeless teenagers could get legitimate part-time jobs and places to stay. As recently mentioned here, my own grandfather was one of those children whose parents wanted to marry people who didn't want stepchildren. Great-Grandfather simply loaded his first wife's children--boy and girl, ages ten and twelve--into the wagon, took them into town, stopped at a street where desperate unskilled laborers looked for jobs, males on one corner and females on another, and set them out on the appropriate corners with orders to find domestic work where they could get room and board as part of their wages. It was common in those days. Little girls sent "out to service" could expect, a hundred years ago, to be hired and supervised by women who spoke to them coldly but not usually unkindly, treated as social inferiors by their employers but free to marry up the ladder if they could; Great-Aunt married well. Grandfather was taken "out west," worked on ranches, qualified as a lawyer, chose to practice horse training rather than law, and had his own farm and family before age thirty. 

Now, thanks to increasing bureaucracy, teenagers in that kind of situation can't get work, may be unable to document their own identity even to get into school, and may be able to stay with friends for a while, but will very likely turn to theft, prostitution, or the illegal drug trade just to feed themselves. In Florida they can sleep outdoors, but they're likely to be robbed of whatever they have, including shoes and socks, and probably also raped. Some of them may feel lucky if they're able to trade sex for room and board...at least until the men who offer such arrangements get tired of them and throw them out. Some may feel successful in their criminal careers. Others feel shamed and defiled by what they've done, whether they've killed rival drug dealers or been caught the first time they stole a box of tampons. 

(Sokolik tells us that, until recently, government handout programs made no provision for personal hygiene supplies--not Kotex, not shaving kits, not even soap. She claims some of the credit for getting Florida public schools authorized to distribute free female hygiene supplies, though not, apparently, the gender-neutral kind. "Poor hygiene" remains at the top of the list she advises adults to look for when looking for "unaccompanied homeless youth." These teenagers go out for school sports teams, whether they're athletic or not, for the showers but a good laundry barter is harder to find than an invitation to sleep over with a school friend for a week.)

So they need homes--not only beds, but people they can trust to reassure them that what's happened to them is not who they are. Of course, it would be too much to expect that Sokolik would be either willing or able to teach these kids about the many reasons to say no to "a thread or a shoe latchet" in federal handouts. She encourages them to take all the handouts they can take. If they could get into foster care and have money sent to someone regularly for offering them a home, she seems to believe, they ought to do that. But of course many of them turn out to have been foster or even adopted children for whom "it didn't work out" with their official parent-substitutes. 

Close to twenty years later, by the end of the book, several of Sokolik's first few rescues are now active "mentors" for other homeless youth in what's become her organization. They're off the streets, off the drugs, off the welfare, employed, married, some with children of their own. 

It's awesome, really. It's a heartwarming true story. You can look up the TV and newspaper stories right here on your computer. There's no shortage of other people publicly saying nicer things about Sokolik than she says about herself. Her message is not "See how wonderful I am" but "What we've done is working. Carry it on!" 

I only wish that, along with if not in place of the story about the teenager who overcame her prejudice against an ethical, monogamous lesbian "mentor," this book had included a story about a teenager who had learned to embrace per own introversion in a satisfactory relationship with an introvert "mentor." 

Bonus Post: Freedom

Freedom's not free: takes

work. A vote for handouts is

a vote for slavery.

 

Hunger in America

Some thoughts that plopped out of my head as I read an expatriate e-friend's thoughts and prayers after hearing the world news on TV, where politically biased news readers talk about hunger in the United States as if it were something that fitted into the Marxist narrative where horrible capitalists force people to work sixteen hours a day and don't pay them enough to feed them. Well, that's not the way it works. I thought of this person's foreign readers reading the words that fit into the narrative that totally does not fit, and found myself typing all this...

Much of the poverty in the US is caused by our definition of poverty as having less than 80-90% of the people. That means that 10-20% of people will *always* be “below the poverty level”…the poor, poor people who might have to depend on government aid for cell phones, private school tuition. and name-brand athletic shoes for unathletic growing children.

People who’ve lost everything in floods, fires, etc., really are poor–at least temporarily. People who are homeless in cities really are poor–though the majority of “homeless & hungry” panhandlers are neither homeless nor hungry. Then there’s the kind of poverty that comes from not knowing what to do with what people have. I think that accounts for most of the hungry children, whatever color.

It’s not that food, or money to buy food, isn’t there. It’s not that most of the children are small or thin! Most of them are grossly overgrown from eating hormone-fattened meat. They have deficiency diseases because they make bad food choices. They make bad food choices because they listen to advertisements!

I doubt that they’d read books by us old (and White) foodies, and remember, a few years ago, publishers not picking up on a book a young man who survived our peculiar kind of famine wanted to write. The medium to reach them would probably need to be rap videos.

But seriously…anyone with an address can get food stamps in the US. Do not be deceived. They get enough money to buy food for a month. In my town I know which ones always have money/food to barter for other things at the end of the month, and which ones always blow out their handouts in the first week and have bare cupboards toward the end of the month. We cannot and must not try to force food choices on people, so not much can be done except to offer decent school meals (if possible) for the kids. The ones who are hungry for half the month are the ones who eat convenience food for the other half. The ones who bake bread and cook beans are likely to bring me sacks of canned veg to trade.

So for the second half of the month, in my town, they can go to the food bank. Some young relatives of mine run that program now. They get all kinds of food donations and cash, too, to help with water and electricity bills. It’s a very well intentioned program that ought to be an adequate safety net if people knew how to use a safety net, and of course some do. They give people a reasonable mix of meat, veg, fruit, bread, pasta, nuts, dairy, and pricey “treat” foods, three big bags per person, enough to get anybody through two weeks…but of course there’s no guarantee that anyone will be able to digest the food person was given, and no efficient way to substitute more appropriate items. They’ll give a whole bag of frozen food to someone who has no freezer, so what’s not eaten that day will be ruined the next day in summer. They give meat to vegetarians, dairy products to the lactose-intolerant, wheat products to the gluten-intolerant, and often on roads leading away from the food bank on handout days you find a whole bag of handout food someone couldn’t use lying beside the road!

Then there’s a church meal program for those who can’t cook, which spotlights an even worse problem–the case I knew of personally died just this summer–where addicts will buy food, take food from food banks and church meal programs, and resell that food for booze and drugs.

Hunger is a large-scale problem even in the USA, but not one that can be solved by just throwing money at it. 

Home

This is a story written in response to a prompt for "real, true stories" on the theme of "home." The "I" is I, narrating real memories. The other people are fiction because I never signed a contract to write the biographies of real people in their situation. Their situation is, nevertheless, real. Jane might be this person, might be that one. Don't bother about that, local lurkers. The story is meant to call attention to a social problem not a person.

Home

 The women of the Appalachian Mountains are as diverse as any other lot, Joyce Dyer affirmed in Bloodroot. What we have in common is a sense of place. Even those who no longer live in the place they call home always talk, write, and sing about home with profound love...

1

I was born two thousand miles away from home, on the other side of a city that was never home, because in between the house my parents had rented and the hospital where they wanted me to be born, the city was burning. Riot and defiance were in the air; some of them landed and settled on me.

Dad didn’t think he wanted to go home during those years when we were failing to be Angelenos. Not enough jobs paid enough to support children, he said, for one thing. 

Mother had no home. Born in Kansas while her parents were living in Oklahoma, she’d been a happy little “Okie” on a farm near a small town in Indiana in the 1930s. She liked the tiny high school, liked cheering for their tough little team against all the teams from bigger and better funded schools. When she was in grade ten the government decided to build a dam that left her home town at the bottom of a lake.

I don’t remember when my feet first touched the ground that Dad’s ancestor, five generations back, picked out for himself after surveying the land and designing our town. I would have been two or three years old; I’d already travelled from California to Indiana, Florida, Texas, and back to California. A few years later I remember feeling that my ancestors’ land had always been home, that even at two years old the ground would have felt better underfoot than any other soil on Earth.

Home was a farm near a small town in Virginia, where we were part of an old landowning family, but always the poor relations. “Oil” still presupposed “millions”; cousins had both; we had neither. Most of the material advantages children want found their way to us, usually secondhand. Actual money was tight. The real wealth, the source of status, we enjoyed was the extended family.

“After I had polio I just quit growing for years,” Dad said, telling my brother how to stay out of fights. “There is strength in numbers. I stuck close to my brothers and cousins. Nobody wanted to mess with the pack of us.”

Home was only a small orchard around an old house, but it extended to include hundreds of acres that belonged to relatives, where we were as safe and free as we were on our parents’ official property. Its privileges included store credit, taxi service, bicycles, horses, music lessons, summer camp, winters in Florida, books, records, a posher wardrobe than I even wanted, a tree fort, a cave, and at least a hundred elders to watch over us and give us good advice.

2

Two of those elders were Dad’s younger first cousins. Let’s call them something creative like Jane and Mary. The year Mother was ill, they took turns coming in each morning to help with the housework and “visit” us children. They were adults but Mary, literally the little sister, bought her off-the-rack clothes in the “teen” department. We loved both of them.

To us children it seemed obvious that their father, our Great-Uncle Vito, was rich. He owned only forty acres of land, but he’d owned it all his life and always did wonderful things with it. He could get anything to grow; he knew what everything you might find in the woods or fields was good for. He had once made a pet of an owl. He considered the owl a mistake and was content to be followed around by processions of horses, cattle, goats, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, sometimes young quail or a tame deer. He kept bees, too, and mantids to control the nuisance insects, and allowed a snake to lay her eggs under the porch. He was always doing something interesting and useful, but never too busy to talk, in a slow aristocratic drawling voice, to any child who tagged after him. Since he had eleven grown-up children and about forty nieces and nephews, children usually were tagging after him. As an example of what a country gentleman ought to be, it is still hard for me to imagine a better one than Uncle Vito.

His wife, our Great-Aunt Bertie, was a pretty good example of a Virginia lady, too; but she, and those of her children who resembled her, ran to diabetes and hypertension and fat. She was massive, resembling a menhir or a refrigerator more than a Southern Belle. But she was the sort of grandmother who observes babies closely enough to be able to set them on a potty before, not after, they wet a diaper.

A farm like theirs really needed more than two adults, so it seemed natural that most of their children lived at home until they were married. Jane and Ken never seemed to go anywhere else at all. They stayed at home and helped their parents. Every few years one of them might spend a weekend with one of their married siblings or someone who’d been ill; they never travelled. If they had finished high school, which I didn’t ask and wasn’t told about, they certainly hadn’t gone to college. They never had long-term jobs off the farm.

They were deeply religious in a modest, unassuming, even Anabaptist way. Spirituality was expressed through obedience to rules. The rules were freely adopted during private experiences that could be intense, but were not talked about much. One showed love for God by doing the house and farm work diligently, being content with low pay in bad years and generous with slightly less low pay in better years, dealing honestly and kindly with everyone, never quarrelling or holding a grudge, living within one’s means. If either Jane or Ken or Bertie or Vito ever broke those rules—I wouldn’t really be surprised, but I never heard about it.

It was a surprise, in my twenties, to realize that Uncle Vito was one of the poorest farmers—in terms of mere money—in the county. He never "needed" money. Sometimes he had a little money to give away.

3

Sometimes I tried to imagine what being my Cousin Jane, the placid baby-sitter, actually felt like. She was young at the time. She must have had hormone surges. If she did, she kept the urges to run or dance as well hidden as the urges to quarrel, whine, or sleep late in the morning. Jane was, so far as anyone could guess, asexual. Nobody remembered her ever having expressed any other intense feeling, either.

Sister Ann married. Jane was a flower girl. Ann moved to New York City with her husband. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Brother Bill went to college, university, seminary, became a minister. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Sister Carol married. Jane was a bridesmaid. Carol had six children. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Even Mary went to Pennsylvania to work with Don and his wife. Jane stayed home and did chores.

I heard a story, second or third hand, that a young man once tried to talk to Jane. Jane gave one-word answers to direct questions while walking briskly toward home. When she turned off the main road, the young man continued to follow. Jane brandished a heavy stick she'd spotted beside the road, shouting “Git off home!” exactly as if he’d been a dog.

I heard another story, at least third and probably fifth hand, that Jane had been brutally molested, perhaps even raped, by an escaped convict who ran across her parents’ land when she was ten years old; that that was why she’d grown up asexual.

I never asked whether either story was true.

She’d been an average student. She’d been reasonably popular at school; all reasonable children were always more interested in home life than in school life, and the eighth of eleven children naturally felt no need for more child companions. She went to church and chatted pleasantly with other women there, but the farm and her family were Jane’s world.

When Jane and Mary were baby-sitting, I classified people as Horses or Cows, according to their apparent metabolic rate. Mary was a Horse person, like Uncle Vito and Dad and me. Jane was a Cow person, like Aunt Bertie and Mother. Horse people were not always nicer than Cow people, but they were healthier and happier and had more fun. Horse people were positive role models, therefore, and Cow models were negative role models. Though I liked Jane I looked for her differences from me and hoped I wouldn’t grow up like her in any way.

4

After Mother was able to do her own chores again, and Mary moved away, my brother and I grew bigger and did different things every year. To my relief, my brother grew into a Horse person, a faster and sturdier little pony than I was, and after a year or two of infantile bickering we achieved a few years of real friendship, gardening and making up stories and despising school.

Jane stayed the same. Though she was taller than Mary, by the end of grade seven I was as tall as Jane.

I kept track of the different years by the different things I was doing: hand sewing, machine sewing, strawberries, pony, piano, tree fort. Jane, when visited, was always cooking the same meals in the same way, sweeping the same floors, tending the same fires.

Jane must have noticed some difference after Aunt Bertie had the stroke. It took her months to retrain her mouth to speak, slurring words, and her bad leg to move forward, not reliably holding her weight but following the rest of her, anyway, as she shuffled around holding on to things or people. Jane would have been the person she held on to, mostly. This addition of extra nursing chores made no noticeable difference to Jane.

How did she keep track of her years? Probably by the children and animals in her life. Jane baby-sat nieces and nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews. In her free time she made pets of wild animals and taught chickens to do silly pet tricks.

Year after year, children whose parents were ill or who were having trouble at school went to stay with Cousin Jane, and learned how to cut up and fry a chicken, how to crochet an afghan, how to bake fluffy biscuits in a wood stove, how to hitch the old Morgan mare to the sledge and drive up to the woodlot for firewood, and how to teach bantams to perch on their shoulder.

5

The children she used to baby-sit travelled around the world. The walls of her house were covered in postcards and snapshots, from every State and several foreign countries. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Nephew Jack, who was about my age, had a particularly bad trip. He married young and had two children. Then he became ill. When the doctor told them there was no cure, Jack’s wife attempted suicide. Jane (and Ken and Bertie and Vito) brought up Jack’s children, Ben and Beth. Other children stayed with Jane for afternoons, days, or weeks. Ben and Beth stayed all through their school years.

One year the bureaucrats in charge of the family’s monthly handouts decided that Jane and Ken should not be “under one roof” with their parents. Jane and Jeb had to have their own “benefits” mailed to their own addresses. Two new mailboxes were set up beside Uncle Vito’s mailbox. Two small camp trailers were set up among the outbuildings that surround every farmhouse. Whenever I visited Ken usually, and Jane always, continued to be in their parents’ house.

Another year, Aunt Bertie died at ninety-one. After that the house seemed like a different place to me. Whatever changes were made passed by Cousin Jane. She still cooked the same meals the same way, and swept the same floors.

Another year the bureaucrats decided that Great-Uncle Vito had collected too many handouts to own a farm. The land had to be sold for at least a certain amount. Cousin Henry bought it. Jane stayed home and did chores.

Frustrated social workers began to question Jane and Ken. Didn’t they want to travel, do jobs...to date? Why would they prefer to stay home watching an old man die?

Jane was sixty-eight. Ken was sixty-three. Ken liked watching some women on TV, he’d admit, but no, he’d never wanted to date. Nor had Jane. They had no particular craving to travel. They liked their “jobs” on their peaceful little farm. They’d been healthy all their lives on home-grown food, though, as they’d started buying more food from supermarkets, they were starting to feel “older”...

“Clinical depression, both of them.” Social workers needed to put something on forms. “Contentment, apart from natural grief” wouldn’t fit into their programs.

The visit where they told me they were taking antidepressants was the last visit I made to Jane and Ken. I’d seen “Prozac Dementia” before and didn’t want to see it again. I was glad to hear that neither of them developed it.

Uncle Vito died at ninety-nine.

7

Now that they were taking medication daily, Jane and Ken admitted, the old farm was a long walk from town; not that either of them had ever learned to drive a car, or wanted to. And, yes, the idea of dying alone in their trailers at night bothered them. Ben and Beth were particularly disappointing. Ben was at least trying to work enough hours to support a child who looked like him and a young woman he’d wanted to marry, but Beth just wasn’t doing well in the city at all. In the city jail, actually. Neither of them had time to visit the aunt and uncle who’d reared them.

“Now we can do so much more to help them,” the social workers smiled. “Apartments in a project with modern conveniences, where they’ll have friends, and their great-great-nieces and -nephews can come to visit....”

Everyone in our town had known for a long time that nobody ever visits anybody in the project because the project is so ugly and depressing. So it spoke well of Jane and Ken that some of their nieces and nephews did come to visit, before the bedbugs moved in.

One evening she invited me to watch a live TV news broadcast. TV reception had never been reliable at her house, and I don’t have a TV set; both of us wanted to watch the show—but Jane never found the right channel on the TV set that came with the apartment. Rent covered cable TV but apparently the channel Jane wanted, when she really wanted to watch TV, was extra.

Someone dumped a kitten in my yard. Having five cats, I thought the kitten might want to stay with Jane while we looked for its rightful owner or permanent adopter. Jane loved the kitten, and it loved her, for one day. Then the project manager warned me not to bring in any animals. Yes, the official policy allowed residents to have one pet—for an extra two hundred dollars a month.

Jane’s eyes looked teary. Well, it was flu season.

After the project manager gave up and admitted the project was full of bedbugs, all visitors were discouraged. Residents of the project had never been encouraged to walk around outside, either. Jane and Ken defiantly walked at least to the store and the library.

“Are you adjusting to it?” I asked Jane once on the steps of the library, telling myself that bedbugs can’t fly.

She said, “I cry every day.”

Relatives looked for Jane and Ken around town. After a few years we didn’t see them any more.

“Jane had skin cancer,” one of the more ghoulish residents of the project told me. “They cut off the tumor, and the last time I saw her, she had pulled off a bandage and found three bedbugs in the wound...”

8

“You’re old enough to retire now!” people who probably mean well—sort of—have started telling me. “No need to work or worry any more! You could get food stamps and an apartment with modern conveniences...”

And bedbugs, I think.

I imagine what it’s like to be Cousin Jane, now, not finding the programs you want when you do want to watch TV, always feeling the inner pull of instincts telling you that it’s time to feed the hens, gather the eggs, check on the visiting children. I think of songbirds, caged in laboratories, at the migrating season.

The bureaucrats can stick their modern conveniences up their noses, I think. I like that radios and non-emergency phone calls work only intermittently for only about one-third of the year, at my home. I don’t want television or Internet connections at home.

My home is no longer the same place it was when it was my parents’ home. I’m no longer the same person. Aunt more than daughter, I keep track of the years now by what I’ve been writing. I’ve travelled and done jobs and been married. I’m a more adventurous cook than my Cousin Jane was, but I’ve come to appreciate the pleasure of sweeping the same floors, my floors, every day.

“You’ll die alone and be found with those animals you ‘foster’ gnawing on your bones!” say relatives who’d like to get at least the cash value of my home. Compared with what the social workers have to offer people like Cousins Jane and Joe, even that doesn’t seem very bad.

I’d rather die naturally, at home.

Morgan Griffith Calls Out Handout Scheme (With Status Update)

Y'know, I just spent the last $100 of my COVID panic handouts...Friday afternoon. On Sunday a person for whom I was supposed to have been doing an odd job, in the real world, backed out due to unexplained illness. Having denied that person had COVID last year, and having had acute complications develop, the person now has this year's version of COVID. (Fully vaccinated? I didn't ask.) On Monday person reported that per temperature hadn't shot up and person hadn't collapsed, but person had gone to the hospital and been ordered into quarantine for two weeks. Open-air markets are still decimated, a lot of people are still afraid to reopen their stores and restaurants or shop in the ones that are open, now a good friend and client is ill, and I just spent one of my last two one-dollar bills till payday to come in and...well, actually, receiving job-related e-mail was the idea. I certainly didn't spend a dollar just to buy an oversized cup of pre-chilled Coca-Cola. But what can you do, when the only places where phones or computers connect to anything, whatever network you or your friends have paid for, are still downtown restaurants. Sitting in a downtown restaurant and not even sipping a drink is sooo tacky.

So tacky that as I sat down, waiting for somebody to finish sipping per drink and checking for phone messages, that person felt moved to show Niceness by buying me a drink (naturally choosing a flavor that I'd be likely to drink if I'd had no access to any other liquid for 48 hours) and a sandwich (but it was too early in the morning to hold on to the sandwich for the cats). Icky. I could so easily have been sick on the floor. Attention people who want to be "nice" or "kind": Before spending your money on any unsolicited purchase for someone you don't know well, ASK the person what person can use. Do not buy sandwiches for celiacs. Do not buy beer for alcoholics, do not buy milkshakes for lactose-intolerant people, do not buy meat for vegans; in short, do not buy food for other people until you know what they want, and if it's not on the one-dollar menu, y'know, ce sont les breaks. If you're so timid you can't get the words "Excuse me, please, may I buy you a drink?" out of your mouth, you could just put some cash on the table and run. Though I wouldn't have parked the laptop on the table if I hadn't intended to buy my own drink, as soon as the person finished what person was doing and left the table from which I watch for my ride home.

Another wonderful virus panic day in the Fightin' Ninth District. Well calculated for this e-mail from U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9 (further comments below):

"

Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Biden Administration was considering paying $450,000 each to illegal immigrants affected by the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy. Families could receive close to $1 million, and the total cost to taxpayers could total more than $1 billion. 

 On November 3, President Biden said of the payments, “That’s not gonna happen.” 

 The next day, his staff said he was “perfectly comfortable” with the payments. 

 I believe American taxpayers should not be on the hook for such outrageous sums to individuals who broke our immigration laws. That’s why I cosponsored a resolution from Congresswoman Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) condemning these payouts. 

Additionally, I joined colleagues in sending letters to Biden Administration officials urging them to halt the policy. 

 I will continue to advocate for the rule of law and oppose hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars going to payouts for illegal immigrants. 

 "

Now: Legitimate, law-abiding, natural-born citizens of these United States are still feeling penniless and desperate. I'm one; I know some others. And what we want, dear Members of Congress one and all, is not another round of handout checks. We. Want. Paid. Jobs. Never mind about "career tracks" and such twentieth-century notions, but we do want to get paid for what we're able to do, while we're able to do it. 

I officially achieved "senior citizenship" a while ago, and though I'll take any discounts any clever storekeepers care to offer on their massively overpriced merchandise, I am now in a position to say this, now that it affects me rather than the parents of anyone I know. (Now that very very few people I know have parents, and if we do this proposal would not affect them.) I say we need to save Social Security now. The way to save it is to save it for those who are no longer able to get up and walk to a store, or office, or restaurant, or the Friday Market, or around the streets picking up cans. Save the pensions for those who truly are disabled. Get the rest of us back to work on whatever one-year-or-however-long-we-have gigs we can still do, paying taxes. 

We do not want to be officially pronounced "useless needers." We do not want to be overseen by people who floundered through at the bottoms of easy classes. We do not want to trade our homes, where we remember where things are, for miserable little flats in vermin-filled slum buildings. We do not want a thread nor a shoelatchet from the Welfare State. All we want is to go on earning our livings in peace.

And let the immigrants know, please and thank you, that however much we may like them as people, even welcome them as visitors, there is no room for more permanent immigrants in our economy. Such jobs as are available need to be done by people who were born here. If you were born somewhere else and you have a dream, go home and make your own native country great. 

Status Update: Physical Store a Success, but May Die

There's an old Irish-English joke: "The operation was a success, but the patient died."

It reflects the reality of life for people of Irish descent. In addition to the alcoholic and celiac genes, another mutation our ancestors bred into the gene pool is intolerance of a general anesthetic. After a simple and successful surgical operation, a patient who has this gene will have a fatal stroke anyway. We have to insist on local anesthetics only.

Anyway, that's the reference of the title of this status update. After six weeks of stress and anxiety, the physical Internet Portal store has finally shown a profit on the small investment I made. I'm pleased. On the other hand, what I have in the store is seasonal merchandise that won't be on display in January; my profits haven't been enough to fill the store with new non-seasonal merchandise--and I hate that,'cos I wanted to bring in a lot of things e-friends have made for sale--and other crafters aren't rushing to invest their money in making it a great multi-craft cooperative. I may have to take my profits and go back to open-air markets next year. The store has been a success but, if others don't want to take the same risk I did, the store may still...well, die back in the way frostbitten plants do. It will still have living roots but it won't be visibly growing above the ground. I'm not pleased about that.

This is a Tuesday and I'm not going to take the time to post a full-length rant about how completely cutting off all handouts to anyone who's able to come in and apply for tax-funded benefits, who is not either active as an entrepreneur or spending days in a day labor site, would actually help the so-called poor people in my part of the world.

The biggest source of distress to me, during these weeks in the store, has been those agents of the Evil Principle who may think they mean well when they say things like "Ooohhh, ooohhh, you're spending what little income you have and you're not instantly becoming rich! How terrible! How terrible! Why don't you just give up trying to do anything on your own, just go on welfare if you can't get an entry-level minimum-wage job at age 50, and for that matter just give up having your own home and move into Bedbug Towers, so at least people wouldn't be worrying about you or feeling sorry for you!"

If people are sincerely worrying about me or feeling sorry for me, the best way for them to deal with their emotional discomfort would be to bring a few hundred dollars into the store and spend it. Then I could set up a safe off-grid heating system and nobody would have to worry about my freezing in my own home, which I would prefer to smothering in some sort of horrible stack-and-pack warehouse for welfare cheats.

Given my able body, hyperthyroid metabolism, and habituation to physical activity, I'd probably be the last person in my town or county to suffer any permanent damage if we did have another snow disaster like last week's. Those who enjoy worrying and being busybodies might be better advised to worry about their lazy selves. For me, walking ten miles in the snow was fun. For them, it wouldn't be fun, and it just might become necessary.

Unfortunately other crafters who ought to be sharing the store and earning money have become dependent on a lifestyle of merely taking money. "I've 'retired' now," they wail, or "I'm a single mother and have to have 'benefits' to take care of the child," or "I can't afford to lose my Medicaid," and "Won't you just take a few things and sell them on commission, and slip me the cash under the table if you sell things?" I wouldn't mind selling other people's things on commission, but I mind bitterly that people are wasting their God-given talents by depending on a system that punishes them for earning fifty dollars here and twenty dollars there when they can.

We'd be better off with a welfare policy like Grover Cleveland's, where if people really didn't have food or clothing they got off the couch and bartered something for it, and nobody had time to sit around trying to tear down whatever their neighbor might be trying to build.

A book title comes to mind. Yes, Amazon still has a picture of the same edition I read when it was new. I remember being put off by the level of profanity in this comedian's books, but compared to the way many urban young people talk today it's almost tasteful.

Makers and Takers and Squishy Republicans: Friday Rant

So this came in the e-mail...repeatedly, from multiple correspondents, all of whose information has been scraped out of the text between the quotation marks below:

"

Call to Action

Delegate Kilgore Wrote an Op-Ed in the
Roanoke Times Justifying Medicaid Expansion
Using Work Requirements!

States that have expanded Medicaid
who are requesting work requirement waivers
are using these waivers to
ROLL BACK EXPANSION NOT SAVE IT!

WHAT DON'T THEY UNDERSTAND ABOUT
"NO MEDICAID EXPANSION"?

ASK THEM
How Much Money is Enough?

The Proposed Budget includes $34 BILLION for
Virginia Health and Human Services. That's 30% of the Budget!

Medicaid expansion states, on average, have spent
more than double what was initially projected.

On average, expansion states have signed up
twice as many people as expected.

Federal Government money for states
to use to expand Medicaid is being cut.

TELL THEM "NO DEAL"
NO work Requirement in exchange for Expansion
NO More money thrown at problems
NO expansion; "Use the money
we have more effectively"

WE NEED REFORM - NOT EXPANSION
[A Work Requirement Would Be a Nice Little Reform]

CALL / VOICEMAIL / EMAIL
The Delegate Elected to Represent YOU!
Tell Them to
OPPOSE MEDICIAD EXPANSION
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES:

Delegates phone and emails HERE
Not sure who your Delegate is? HERE

Call These Squishy Delegates for Sure:

Terry G.	Kilgore	(804) 698-1001	DelTKilgore@house.virginia.gov
S. Chris	Jones	(804) 698-1076	DelCJones@house.virginia.gov
Jeffrey L.	Campbell	(804) 698-1006	DelJCampbell@house.virginia.gov
David E.	Yancey	(804) 698-1094	DelDYancey@house.virginia.gov
Israel D.	O'Quinn	(804) 698-1005	delioquinn@house.virginia.gov
James W.	Morefield	(804) 698-1003	DelJMorefield@house.virginia.gov
Todd E.	Pillion	(804) 698-1004	DelTPillion@house.virginia.gov

"

"Squishy Delegates"? I've always thought mine, at the top of that list, was a pretty solid Delegate. When, as now, he's not representing me, he is at least representing his constituency, who are generally considered to be Republicans.

Part of the problem is, of course, a bit of gerrymandering that took place a few years ago. Delegate Kilgore of Gate City, which maps almost true flag red when maps use Red to stand for the old Right and bLue for the old Left, is also supposed to be representing some of the old coal towns to our northeast, which map sort of purplish due to the presence of full-time professional "needers." Not otherwise "liberal" in any sense, many of these people have lived out a life plan of working until they acquire a genuine disability and then spending the rest of their lives watching TV, gossipping, and eating junkfood at the public expense.

We have enough of them in Gate City, even, to account for the idea of Obamacare death panels. It's quite amazing how little time a person has to spend, doing real work, and looking at the teeth of "needers" who waddle around laughing at the people they intend to spend the rest of their lives exploiting, before death panels start to seem like a good idea. There's no question that any town is better off when the people who don't appreciate the need for productive employment "when anyone over fifty can get Supplemental Security anyway" are being naturally recycled into pretty wildflowers.

Work requirements? Nice idea, yes. In practice, local social workers have been exploiting a loophole, claiming that these people caaan't get corporate career-type jobs, to keep the "needers" busy "needing" and keep the social workers on the payroll for year after year after year. Today's reality is that defining "work requirements" as "at least apply for corporate career-type jobs" means: welfare as a lifetime career. If we want to see any progress toward financial independence, we have to understand "work requirements" as including temporary gigs, day labor, self-employment, flea markets, selling postcards on street corners, but no more handouts to people who aren't earning a little money from those. If work requirements had teeth in them, like "Any recipient of tax-funded benefits who is able to sit up will sit up on a day labor site, holding a sign advertising his or her work experience, for 40 hours a week, unless or until led off that site by an employer, and any failure to do any job will result in suspension of all benefits for at least one year," then "exchange for work requirements" would be reasonable.

On election days, however, polling places in Gate City are always surrounded with a few hundred Republican signs and maybe, or maybe not, even one sign for any Democrat on the ticket. If Republicans were solid in support of their professed beliefs, these "needers" would not want to live here. They'd go and infest Democrat precincts, and the sight of them waddling and giggling in would convert many a lifelong Democrat to Republicanism, too. We might end up without a single voting precinct where a single working person would vote in favor of any welfare scheme whatsoever. This might not be a bad thing. Some of the "needers" would go back to work, and the rest of them would lie down and die...sounds like a win-win.

Not that I would ever support any scheme for randomly shortening all of their lives, across the board. No corporate-managed welfare scheme would ever know which of the Maggot People could be restored to human life; even their relatives wouldn't know that, without trying.

Unfortunately we'll probably never know which of our Maggot People still had enough humanity to become productive human beings, because Republicans do not solidly support any realistic cuts to welfare schemes.

This idea of handing out food instead of food stamps? It's not even a good joke. It was tried. Young people may not remember this, but Donald Trump is old enough that, if he were as blue-collar as he's claimed to be, he'd remember it well.

That old railroad track that runs through Gate City used, Gentle Readers, to stop at the depot, which was what the building currently occupied by the Life Saving Crew used to be, and it used to offload, among other things, crates of free food for our "needers." In those days my father used to be a loader, one of the young men who earned extra money, once a month, repacking the contents of the crates into cardboard boxes so each "needer" got what was considered a reasonable amount of balanced nutrients each month. Sometimes in summer fewer than half of the "needers" would show up to collect their free food, because it was in fact pretty horrible food. After distribution day the loaders would take home what was left. The free food program was replaced with food stamps in 1974 and I remember using up the last packet of U.S.D.A. powdered eggs in our house in 1978. (When you have hens as pets, it takes you a while to use up powdered eggs...but my parents believed wasting food was a sin.)

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-food-pantry-handout-game-or.html

To be fair, canned pears are pretty boring no matter who does what with them, and in baked goods where you don't actually taste the egg powdered eggs aren't bad. The cornmeal...I believed for years it had chalk mixed in, but have finally been convinced it was lard, which I don't willingly eat. The one time Mother tried heating up the canned chicken, I had a brainwave and wanted to take it out for a picnic where I could give it a decent private burial, and after Mother tasted it herself she told Dad not to bring it home again. And we didn't know that wheat-based food was what was making my mother and me, and later my natural sister, so unhealthy, each in a different way. I ate a lot of biscuits and macaroni and oatmeal cookies, and liked them, and took a little saucer of vitamin pills with my wheat-germ-enhanced oatmeal every morning, and wondered why I still had symptoms of so many vitamin deficiencies.

But what I remember best was the macaroni with nutritional yeast. We all sat down and took one hopeful bite of this new treat, and then with one accord we all--my parents, too, without a word--stood up and scraped our plates out on the ground for the chickens. And the chickens all walked up and took one hopeful bite, and started wiping their beaks on the grass and giving us disgusted "I thought you were a friend" looks.

So Dad and the loaders and even the social workers wrote a lot of official letters recommending that instead of being stuck with all this nasty so-called food each month, the "needers" should just be given some sort of financial aid to buy normal food that human beings would eat. That would be so much more efficient for the welfare office, which wouldn't need to occupy the depot building for a week every month; the "needers" could just go to the grocery store like anyone else. And Dad was supposed to get a new job in September 1974, so it didn't matter that the welfare office stopped paying loaders in May and that in June and July of 1974 we had an opportunity to buy groceries with those shiny new food stamps. Food stamps were such an improvement, freeing up so much money in the budget and making it possible for poor people to feed their children things that, in theory, wouldn't leave their children with symptoms of almost every vitamin deficiency known to humankind, even after taking a little saucer of vitamin pills every morning.

So...oh right, let's go back to the food handout scheme and lose the improvement food stamps offered. Like that'll stop people abusing the food stamp program? Hah. If Republicans were in Gate City today I could show them an actual food stamp abuser who sells both food stamp shopping privileges, and food pantry handout food, for alcohol, having apparently made a commitment to drink himself to death. Yes, it's a pity and a shame. No, giving him more actual food instead of food stamps wouldn't slow down his process of self-destruction. If anything it might speed up that process. More people will trade booze and pills for actual food, since that involves less risk of being seen...

For an encore, I suppose, the administration will next propose to improve vehicles by eliminating round wheels.

Suppose Scott Adams is right. Suppose Donald Trump is a master persuader, such that even the moments of his campaign when you could all but see the status bar light up flashing "HE'S LYING" were strategically planned to recruit a percentage of the vote. If that were the case, then that line about going back to the food distribution program of 1973 would be a brilliant strategy for persuading Republicans that Trump wants to cut the welfare budget while, in practice, allowing the welfare budget to continue to bloat. And if that were the case, Republicans would be delighted...because when there's any actual chance to cut the budget items Republicans say they want to cut, Republicans have in historical fact been squishy.

Republicans do not rush to support poor people in their own neighborhood who are trying to get off welfare or stay off welfare. In fact I've even met Republicans who've seemed to want other people to stay poor. I could name at least three people--all of whom have long considered me a school friend of their children's, two of whom also claim me as a friend of theirs--whose thinking has been quite transparent lately. It goes like this: "Tracy's a doctor, Lee's a lawyer, Dale wrote a book, and our Blair was 'Most Valuable Server' at McDonald's last month...at thirty-five. Sigh. Well...but 'The Economy' is making it hard for any 'young' person to Get Ahead these days. There are Pat, Addison, Madison, Brook, and Page, too, all on welfare, so our Blair's not done all that badly..." They may have whatever emotional feelings they use the word "like" to mean toward me, or want me to have those feelings toward them or toward their no-talent Blair or their Blair's older siblings. They do not want me, or Pat or Addison or Madison, to succeed in business. Every month I survive off welfare make it more painfully obvious that their Blair is a no-talent.

Republicans do not reliably denounce boondoggle projects. They laugh loud and long at some of the ridiculous pork proposed by other people's elected officials for their States or districts, but when a project is proposed that might put more residents of their own district on the payroll, somehow it's not so funny any more. Technically in Weber City, rather than Gate City, we have a proposed bridge-widening project that is in practice expected to narrow the bridge--the only four-lane bridge in town, this is, being narrowed to two lanes--for another two years, with the result that at least one owner of a business close to the bridge has lost enough trade to have threatened in a county meeting to close the store. But, but...a lot of people have useless brothers-in-law who are on the payroll for the widening of this bridge. Obviously. Anyone driving from Gate City to Kingsport can just see all the in-laws not-working as the actual work is postponed and re-postponed.

Republicans do not reliably support cuts to unsustainable socialist schemes like Social Security and Medicaid. Republicans do recognize the fundamental illogic, the built-in unsustainability, of any scheme that relies on the impossibility that any national population will always have a great many more working adults earning good wages than it has "retirees" who would like to believe that the money they're drawing out of these schemes is the money they paid in. (They don't want to admit that that's not the case, either. "I worked for thirty-five years and had that Social Security taken out of my paycheck every week"--and that money was spent, at that time, to support other old people; if, Sir or Ma'am, the benefits you receive each month weren't being paid in by other young people, they wouldn't be there; if you don't support the economic infrastructure of working adults, what's actually in your retirement fund is a lot of IOU slips. Good luck collecting those if you keep on buying things made in China and whining that you don't "need" things made by local self-employed people.) But, but...if cuts were made in Social Security and Medicaid handouts, these Republicans would...would...h--h--have to trim their own personal budgets and support their own parents? ?!?!?! Unthinkable! Don't talk about it! Even for Senator Dole, any suggestion that our government needs to stop giving Social Security and Medicaid beneficiaries whatever they squall for, no questions asked, was political suicide!

It does not surprise me that several solidly Republican Delegates are cooperating with the consistently, one could even say solidly, squishy Republican Party in this desperate move to appease the Gimmee Monster by transferring more of the burden of Medicaid to the states rather than the federal government. Not that it is, or ever was, or ever will be, or ever can be, sustainable for the states either. We are talking about positioning the cushions in advance of the inevitable crash.

I replied to one correspondent:

"
For too many people, the Welfare State (or "Gimmee Monster") has embedded the idea that a good elected official is one who gets more federal benefits for more of the "poor" people of our district. The poor, poor people who just can't find a scrap of wood to mend a broken-down bed frame on ooonly $1000 a month. I could show them how to live well, improve a house, launch a business, and support charities on $1000 a month, and once set up an Indiegogo page to invite people to sponsor that--I've been living without handouts on much less than $1000 a month since 2005. I still think it's possible that, if this project had been funded, its success might have got some local Republicans to listen.

As it is, people still prefer to go on believing the old outdated story about our being POOR people who CAAAN'T take care of our own without lots of handouts from--I think some of them may still believe the money's coming from Eleanor Roosevelt, as distinct from coming directly from us and, in the course of reprocessing, being used to interfere with so many things that everyone in Scott County would actually prefer to what's been shoved upon us in order to get those handouts.
"

Virginia's House District 1 is not, by any reasonable standard, a poor district. It's less obscenely wealthy than some parts of these United States. It is and has always been far less poverty-stricken than at least some of the slum neighborhoods in every major city, and than most of the Native American "reservations."

One thing that can seem to support our misbelief about our collective poverty is the fact that prices haven't been as ridiculously inflated as they have in the other corners of Virginia. Consistently during my lifetime, the same annual salary on which a reasonably mindful spender can live royally in Gate City has been one on which a frugal fanatic can live well in Washington and one that won't even rent a furnished room, never mind meals, in New York.

The "makers and takers" thread at this web site started when I read that newspaper interview with the Maggot Boy who was requesting donations from the public to help him mend his bed frame on an income of $1000 a month. Hah. With an income like that my first regular publisher, George Peters, paid all his bills and was an entrepreneur, job creator, and public benefactor. I'm not saying that Maggot Boy's suffering wasn't real, for him. I am saying that it was created, not by lack of money, but by lack of an intelligent, ethics-based idea of what to do with the money he had.

Those old-school "conservative" church rules could be silly, and had little to do with real spirituality...and yet I suspect they helped the Depression generation live on really low incomes. In this part of the world, in the 1930s, respectable people joined different churches that seemed to compete for some sort of prize on having the strictest and silliest rules. No alcohol. No dancing. No card games. No theatre-going. No frivolous book reading. No musical accompaniment even for singing hymns in church. No inedible flowers in gardens. No cosmetics or other fashion items of the moment. In one church (possibly a barber was an active member) all men must be clean-shaven at all times; in another church (probably no barbers) men had to wear a neatly trimmed beard "if able." I am not making this up. But the effect of all these rules was to force people to live frugally and, if they had extra money, invest it or donate it, rather than spending it on silly fads. Young people who grew up without church rules, whose ideas of how to spend money were shaped by television instead, honestly think it's hard to make ends meet on what are, in fact, comfortable incomes.

What would I do if I were given $150 a month with the stipulation that I had to spend it on food? I'd certainly have to make a job of figuring out how to spend it on food for myself alone, and I wouldn't try. Yet I've seen people--the last time I watched this at close range was enough years ago that local lurkers wouldn't know who it was--get their food stamps and lug in their bags full of junkfood, "novelties," microwave dinners-on-trays. Not candy or soda pop; pizza and cheese steaks. "No, the full amount of food stamps never lasts me through the month," they wail.

They have problems, all right, these "needers." They'd probably find it as hard to develop a normal healthy sense of how to shop for groceries as they would to develop a normal body shape, or walk two miles in an hour, or keep up with the work in a junior college or trade school course whose teacher thinks the course is intolerably slow. Lack of money is not their problem. Lack of instruction and discipline is their problem, and social workers are the last people on Earth who'd be qualified to give them that instruction and discipline.

Their "needs for expanded Medicaid benefits" are, more often than not, directly correlated to their eating habits and (lack of) exercise habits. Their bloated bodies are inefficient machines that tend to break down.

I don't think Delegate Kilgore would know much about these people and their habits. He has his own job, and that's not it. I know...enough about them to see them as distinct, diverse individuals, at least, which is more than any social worker seems to know about them. I've lived among the "Appalachian" sub-species in the point of Virginia, and worked directly with the "Anacostia" sub-species in Washington; of the generalizations that are equally true of both kinds of "needers," the truest has to be that they show a full range of intelligence and character. Some of them are real Horatio Alger stories waiting to happen, and some of them are maggots, will always be maggots, and really will make their biggest positive contribution to this world when they die out of it.

I think showing the "needers" how rich they actually are, and how much good they could be doing instead of the harm they're doing now by being full-time "needers," may be my vocation.

But the correspondent's reply shows why Republicans are such a big part of their own problem...

"

LOL... you nailed it.

The problem they can't see ...

Where is the end of the line of people they want to give free stuff too?

What is the % of the budget that should be for free healthcare? (30% ... $30 BILLION plus is not enough?)

"

Those are good political talking points...for more squishy Republican talk that never goes anywhere. And what was the reply to the new, forward-thinking solution I had just handed this person--demonstrating how well it's possible to live on $1000 a month? "LOL." Person wanted to believe that was a joke. Republicans don't want to believe that they need to put their money where their mouths are. They don't want to believe they need to invest in my project; they don't want to believe they need to support their own parents; they don't want to believe they need to teach their own children...

Laugh on, then, Republicans. "The Economy" is in New Orleans. The date is August 27, 2005. Party hearty! Laisse les bon temps rouler! 

Book Review: Strong Survival

Title: Strong Survival

Author: Cliffie Strong

Date: 2004

Publisher: Christian Appalachian Project

ISBN: none

Length: 100 pages plus donation forms

Illustrations: black and white photos

Quote: “My name is Cliffie Strong and I am 88 years of age…I have survived many hard times.”

She says, while readers want to give her more of a hard time. “Cliffie” is one of the most classic preppy-girl nicknames, referring of course to Radcliffe, which in Cliffie Strong’s case seems like sarcasm. Having “learned all that” the local public “school could teach” at seventeen, she married at eighteen and had three children at twenty-four.

And oh, she was poor, everybody around her home was so-o-o poor, they could hardly survi-i-ive. They all owned land. They were all natural-born citizens of the United States, with the right to travel and find jobs that paid better than farming their land. They were poor, just like incontinent young people in other parts of the country, because they had too many babies. They had the ability to say “no,” just like other young people who wanted their work to be a spiritual practice rather than a mild form of slavery. They didn’t want to think about that, though, and they were so-o-o grateful for the “angels” of the Catholic “Christian Appalachian Project,” who didn’t remind them of it.

Well…to each his or her own. Stereotypes don’t form out of thin air, and Strong has chosen to present herself as one of the most durable stereotypes of the twentieth century, the Barely Literate Hillbilly On the Take. A few of them really did exist, and if you’re from Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, or for that matter Ohio or Pennsylvania, you can give thanks that this specimen was from Kentucky.

Alternatively, of course, if you live with teenagers you can use this book in the classic way literate hillbillies always used this kind of story—showing it to teenagers as an explanation of why you want them to laugh off any experience of Teen Romance they may have, and focus on qualifying for decent jobs, even if they inherit land and live on it. Flatlanders in their ignorance often think people like Strong were typical of all mountain people. They weren’t. They were typical of the ones others pointed out as bad examples.

In between writing and posting this review, I sold the copy of this book I physically owned, but as an Amazon Associate I can resell it to anyone who wants to buy it here. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to support this web site, because the price of used copies on Amazon is so low! For processing any book sale we have to charge $5 per copy, plus $5 per package shipped, plus $1 per online payment (the Post Office collect their own surcharge for real-world payments).

Welfare Reform Rant

(Cut from today's Link Log due to length.)

The Honorable Sam Brownback of Kansas...I have no reason to doubt that he's an honorable man, and his office as a U.S. Representative is certainly honorable...needs to read this blog more often. Here is a well written argument, apart from its being straight out of 1990, in favor of requiring welfare recipients to work or take job training classes in order to keep their benefits. This was a good idea for many, probably for most, welfare recipients when Bill Clinton signed it, and it still is a good idea. Why is it not working in my corner of the world? Because the social workers, the enablers of welfare cheats, can prove that there aren't enough entry-level jobs for these people. That's an undisputed fact. People who are willing to hire an able-bodied welfare cheat aren't willing to pay him or her for twenty hours a week; most people are neither willing nor able to hire the welfare cheat, period.

I know a woman who would, I believe, rather do a pink-collar job than welfare-cheat, in order to be allowed even weekend visits with her children. (Yes, Congressman Brownback, fear it not, Tennessee punishes welfare cheats with one hand, while enabling them with the other.) That woman is still forty years old; she's still competing for work as a cashier, for which she was trained long ago, with slim, perky, sexy nineteen-year-olds; stores that can use cashiers are still hiring the nineteen-year-olds with the gleaming white grins, and the forty-year-old is still a tired, discouraged old pillhead with bad teeth. The only "program" that would have a prayer of changing that would be to think beyond the "jobs" box and allow the welfare cheat to pursue honest self-employment during the transition to an honest, independent lifestyle...in which she might even be able to choose to spend some of her cash on dental work.

I have known, since about age 21, that entry-level jobs for females are nothing more nor less than the highest echelon of sex work--jobs that may allow a girl to get paid for "the sizzle not the steak," and save her "steak" for marriage, but the basis for her employment in those jobs is still the dang-blang-blasted sizzle. I've even been heard to say that this fact of life made me a sex worker; not that I hadn't figured out either how or why to hold on to my physical virginity, but let's face it, nobody has ever hired a girl as a tour guide, salesman, hostess, receptionist, cashier, etc. etc., on the basis of intelligence, work experience, or character. If she thought they did, let her wait for the day when someone guesses her age to be thirty (even if she's forty by that time). She will learn. In those fields, you're hired based on either desperation, relationship to the store owner, or sex appeal.

For males...what I'm seeing is similar. Despite the demise of factories, there are still entry-level jobs for men that are based on physical strength, at least, rather than sex appeal. Advantage the guys. And those jobs are unlikely to be open to a man over age forty, either, even if he's not already written off his ability to do the jobs by having overdone them at twenty-five. Disadvantage the mature men. And I've not hung around where the needy young parents hang out, but most of the people I see welfare-cheating around my town have grey or white hair.

So in my part of the world, "job training" is just another boondoggle that will not accomplish one thing...for poor people. Just another make-work job to keep somebody's useless relative from joining the welfare class. Feh. I don't think the social workers are one bit better than the welfare cheats, morally. I think, as a class, they're worse.

https://medium.com/2016-index-of-culture-and-opportunity/poverty-dependence-introduction-b4cb2acd412a#.fpxtqcwz5

The Food Pantry Handout Game, or Earnhardt's Law in Politics

“Free gifts of love” sounds so much nicer than “work and pay”…until you get up close and personal with what those words are actually used to mean.

I’m a writer—never out of work, often out of pay. I tell a friend I can’t afford to spend a day shopping in the city until I’ve done some odd jobs and earned some money. 

“Can’t afford to go grocery shopping at…” Incredulously, she names the big-chain supermarkets she plans to visit. Two of the three chains advertise their low prices. “You ought to go to the food bank. My daughter does.”

She’s comfortably retired. Her husband still works at a business in which he’s a senior manager. The daughter left a well-paid husband, who's been hanging around town on weekends ever since, and moved back into the parents’ big house in order to get in-state tuition rates for the college course she didn’t bother to finish before marriage; she has a part-time job, drives an expensive inefficient car, and usually wears the latest and most expensive clothes. It’s hard to describe the daughter as a yuppie, because her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were about as affluent members of the bourgeoisie as she aspires to remain. She’s just a rich chick. If she’s ever had to worry about money, it was about maintaining an expensive lifestyle, not about food or shelter. 

It occurs to me that, if this rich chick gets food from the food bank, readers might like to know who else does, or whether anyone is turned away from their biweekly food handout sessions. 

I resolve to check out the food bank, mix this experience in with a little online research, and see if I can get a Schwarm-worthy article out of it. I will, of course, get a blog post that will be too personal and too political for Schwarm out of it. This is the blog post.

Here’s what I take with me: canvas bags, in case I’m offered food, and a key to a storage building, in case I’m offered more than I can eat.

Here’s what I leave behind: any documentation of my real identity. If asked, I’ll disclose my legal name, since most people in my home town know it anyway. I won’t tell any lies about my circumstances. I will not disclose my address, phone number, Social Security number, or any information about anyone with or for whom I’ve worked.

In the small town where I work, where I grew up and went to school, where my ancestors have lived for centuries, I don’t anticipate any reasonable doubt about my being a local voter and taxpayer. Possibly if the food pantry weren’t being supervised, on the day I go in, by an old schoolmate, my entitlement to benefits that have anything to do with the U.S. Department of Agriculture might be questioned.

As things are, the absence of any documentation whatsoever, much less “press credentials,” is not a problem. I walk right in the open door. What I see is not a pantry but a junk store. I see racks of old clothes, shelves of old books, even shelves of bric-a-brac. Angel Receptionist tells me that people have just donated the books, clothes, framed photographs, children’s toys, even teen-to-adult toys like radios and video games. Everything is free to those who qualify for food handouts.

“Do you need food?” she asks sweetly.

“Everybody needs food. A growing teenager who’s not eaten since breakfast would say he needs food.” (It’s about 9 a.m.) “That's the kind of thing I'm here to find out about. Is there a cut-off point at which you tell people to buy their own food?”

A second cousin’s husband steps up to answer my questions about who qualifies for food handouts. They can remember one person, who reported a monthly income higher than my gross income for the year 2015 and claimed to be married to a well paid professional as well, whom they didn’t invite to come back for another food handout next month. They do have general guidelines for what constitutes a low enough income to qualify.

Here’s who might be earning too much money to get these handouts—a large part of which have been donated by people who’ve been told they’re donating the food to “poor, needy, hungry” people. In Virginia, where anyone who really wants to stretch a food dollar can eat tolerably well on $50 to $75 per week, a single adult can claim to need a handout if earning up to $342 per week. If you’re employed at an annual salary below $17,820, you may be surprised to know that you’re a “poor, needy, hungry” person by Virginia standards. For families, the final digit on the income figures varies for no obvious reason, but basically the food bank’s definition of “poverty” starts with $340 per week and adds $120 per family member.

Cousin's Husband takes my word that I earned less than $342 in the month of July. (Have I earned more than $342 in any month in the past, oh, five years anyway? I don’t think so. I remember selling a Rowan sweater I’d knitted for $880, but the person who bought it paid in monthly installments.)  He explains that some of the food is donated by local people and some is bought from the federal government for redistribution. If people report receiving tax-funded benefits, the food bank staff verify that. Otherwise, apparently they take people’s word for everything, or at least second cousin's husband knows he can take mine.

There’s a questionnaire to fill out. Contact information, identity information: I reply “Not applicable.” Date of birth: I give the correct year, no month. Address: I give the correct town name and old mail route number. 

Marital status and household information are on the questionnaire. There are separate spaces for “married, single, divorced, widowed, separated.” It seems an odd question in this context unless you remember that some of the churches who staff the food pantry traditionally had special rules about widows, recognizing them as qualified for a specific ministry. Claiming no qualifications for any office in those churches, I simplify matters by checking “single.” I don’t ask whether the food pantry plans to branch out into a dating service.

The questionnaire asks “Who is Jesus to you?” I write in “Christ the Lord.” No questions are asked.

The questionnaire asks those requesting handouts to break down their monthly income and expenses. The only reason why I’d need to falsify those numbers would be to add to them, because some people might not believe how low they actually are. This seems unnecessary. I’m bemused to note that the questionnaire asks “poor, needy, hungry” people to specify how much they spend on cars, cable TV, satellite TV, and tobacco.

After signing and dating the questionnaire I receive an invitation card. Actually it’s an appointment card, the kind dentists use, with a date in September on it. I can come back and get another load of food on that day, says Angel Receptionist. Meanwhile I’m now entitled to browse for books.

I expect that after seeing what’s on the shelves I’ll fill a canvas bag with whichever discards from the local children’s library aren’t actually falling to pieces. In fact I find about two dozen vintage Christian books that had been on my “look for” list for years. I think I will try to come back in September, if only for a load of children’s books. Dressing dolls to match children’s books has grown from a hobby I took up when one niece was little into my main source of income this year; I currently have, at home, all the dolls I’m likely to dress in the rest of August anyway.

A basket of name-brand candy bars is on a shelf. I take a Payday bar, the kind that at least appears to consist of more peanuts than candy. I like Payday bars, but as with so many other things I ought to be able to eat, I’m no longer sure whether it’s safe for me to eat. Syrup made from BT corn, also known as “Roundup-Ready” corn, and/or glyphosate residues that linger in the said corn, give me the same celiac reaction wheat does. 

Before I’ve scanned two shelves of books, a shopping cart is rolled out, my name is called, and I’m told that this is my monthly food handout for August.

Here’s what the local do-gooders have determined one person needs in the way of food for a month:

• 27 cucumbers
• 21 zucchini
• 1 pound bag English walnuts, shelled
• 2 1-pound cans “French style” green beans with added garlic, sugar, and yeast
• 1 pound can corn
• 1 pound bag white rice. Marked “long grain,” it’s as short a grain as I’ve ever seen; I wonder whether the grains are crumbling from decay or insect damage. 
• 2 pound cans “low-sodium” spinach
• 1 12-ounce can cranberry fruit punch
• 2 1-pound bags “instant mashed” potato flakes
• 1 pint sour cream
• 1 pound can pork & beans in tomato sauce
• 2 1-pound can peas
• 1 pound can chicken noodle soup
• 1 9-ounce box rosemary-flavored Triscuits
• 1 pound box Special K Protein Bars, strawberry-yogurt flavor
• 13-ounce box Ritz crackers
• 7-ounce box macaroni with cheese packet
• 12 mini-croissants in a plastic box
• 2 frozen “chef-style kabobs” with chunks of raw chicken, raw pork, onions and peppers, on sticks

I am not making this up.

Well, obviously they don’t know how many people who come in may be celiacs. Probably they expect that everybody who comes in is already welfare-cheating, has stocked up on meats and sweets, and merely needs encouragement to eat the occasional vegetable as well. Nevertheless. Has anybody ever eaten twenty-one zucchini?

After typing the list into my computer, I return the baked goods to the food pantry. (It occurs to me later that I could have kept them and sold them in the Friday Market; “Protein Bars” whose main ingredient is sugar, closely followed by syrup, would probably sell faster than zucchini.) I eat the Payday bar and drink the cranberry punch, which is syrupy, intense, a fruit drink designed to make soda pop seem inadequate, and contemplate things to do with this bizarre selection of food. Possibly the food bank staff imagine that everyone has an oven to bake zucchini bread and a deep freezer to store it in. I have neither.

The cats are gluten-tolerant, and they seem to like pork as well as chicken. I suppose, to animals designed to digest raw rats, cooked hogs can’t seem much worse. Since I don’t have electricity, the kabobs have to be used up at once. I let them thaw all afternoon, then when the sun sinks low enough that I can bear to think about it I start the usual fire in the garbage barrel, throw in an oak stick, and flame-grill the kabobs. There’s exactly enough pork for the cats’ dinner. When the chicken is crusted black on the outside, firm and white on the inside, I eat the chicken and vegetables. They came from a store that’s known for careless handling of meat, but they don’t taste like listeria or coliform bacteria. In fact they taste pretty good.

The next day, on the way to work, I see what another family—not a welfare-class family—did with their bag of white rice. Most of it’s already been ground to meal in the gutter. By evening the town pigeons have made a good use of it. Anything that thins the town pigeon population is a good thing.

Did I need vegetables? Did anybody need vegetables? Scott County is rural. It’s possible to run out of vegetables in February. In August it takes effort to avoid having all the fresh vegetables anybody could possibly eat. People who don’t plant vegetables dig up and cut back vegetables in their orchards and flower gardens. If you keep grazing on them and don't poison your fields, you can have young, tender, tasty salad greens, dock and dandelion, purslane and plantain, watercress and field cress and some people are even blessed with miners' lettuce, almost all year; I do. Wild onions conveniently pass their peak at the precise time of year when Vidalia onions flood the market. Everybody knows someone who’s planted vegetables, and people who’ve planted vegetables are always willing to share zucchini. Even in the fruit department…we’re between the main fruit seasons, in August, but the only thing in nature that is as intensely sour and sweet as that cranberry punch is a summer apple, and August is the season for those. 

The land is fruitful. Everyone wants to repay all social debts with vegetables. Even though your own soil is thrusting fresh vegetables up at you every morning, in August, your friends press delicious corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, green beans, and squash upon you. Possibly there are some people in Scott County who needed vegetables, in August, and didn’t have them…but to imagine that shoving vegetables into those people’s hands would motivate those people to eat the vegetables takes the uniquely warped brain of a social worker.

I have a theory about social workers. The normal human brain does not develop much interest in other people as people before puberty. (As objects of curiosity, of course, we notice other people much earlier.) A healthy child who has not been abused basically sees the world in terms of “Me, Mommy, Daddy, and everything else out there.” Other children are primarily competition for adults’ attention; at best the child may be trained to think of them as participants in games. The child can, of course, also be trained to act in kind, nurturing ways if adults can arrange to make that consistently rewarding for the child. Preadolescent children learn good manners in the same way toddlers learn a jingle that goes “Ella-minnow-pea”; a few years later, the teenagers understand what good manners mean, in the same way the school-age children understand what “L M N O P” means.

Children who have been abused, however, develop a precocious, pre-empathetic sensitivity to other people’s moods. Relatively less damaged children grow up to be “tactful,” “sensitive” adults. Badly damaged children grow up to be control freaks. Control freaks who have no other talent, but whose parents want them to go to college, major in psychology. Psychology majors who are consistently at the bottom of the class become social workers.  

I have no way to test this theory, but it does account for the way social workers “think.” I don’t think they really do think at all. They learn how to manipulate numbers as necessary in order to claim that something they want to do is likely to benefit a majority of people in some category or others. What social workers really seem to operate on are feelings. They don’t think of asking people what those people need, want, would find helpful. They feel that people ought to need zucchini. Their feelings become upset when they’re reminded that, if there are people who can benefit from having any more zucchini than they already have, those people are on some other continent, not North America. Possibly in Zimbabwe, in the dry season, somebody feels a need for zucchini.

What do the people who come to the food bank need? The church group opens the doors twice a week and dispenses food to a steady stream of visitors for five hours a day. I didn’t stay long enough to count the visitors, but I saw Angel Receptionist signing them in on sheets of lined paper and using up a sheet in a little over an hour. Except for one coltish child, I think I may have been the only person in the building who wasn’t showing a medical need for a reducing diet. Zucchini, maybe, but I saw no need for sour cream and Ritz crackers.

In the bad old days before food stamps were invented, my father used to unpack, sort, and repack U.S.D.A. surplus canned goods at a “Free Food Place” a block or two away from the present site of the food pantry. I remember those cans and packages well. The government officials were careful to bring in no more than the local welfare recipients were supposed to need. Many local welfare recipients wouldn’t show up to collect their packages. There was always a surplus; Dad would always lug home a lot of cans and boxes, and Mother would try to find recipes that made it seem fit to eat. In those days “Free Food” was clearly marked U.S.D.A. free food, never a brand, and it was easy to see why. It was nasty food. The canned goods the food pantry hands out now are much nicer than those awful tins of greasy rancid peanut butter and chalky-tasting cornmeal used to be, I’ll admit. The green beans are "Del Monte Quality."

The idea of canned green beans…well, I like nibbling on a crisp raw green bean, or steaming or stir-frying young green beans just until the color brightens, but I don’t like them cooked until they’re saggy and soggy. Canned green beans are, to my mind, the most boring source of fibre anyone ever tried to sell as food. On a day when the whole neighborhood is full of fresh, juicy green beans, the idea of offering anyone a can of green beans seems downright insulting.

On the second day, I readjust my plan for eating up the cucumbers because they’re not freshly picked. To avoid wasting them, I’ll need to eat ten this day, ten the next day. I love cucumbers but somehow I don’t have much appetite. It’s been a hot day; I don’t have much energy either. I go to bed early. At midnight I bolt out of bed. I have never been able to identify a specific taste or smell with salmonella, so I guess that that’s what was in the chicken. It's not celiac sprue; it's something that was in the chicken.

I’ve never been seriously sick with salmonella, though, so in the morning I go into town and, after a mere four hours in the Friday Market (ninety degrees, ninety percent humidity), find someone to thrust the remaining cucumbers and the zucchini upon. Nobody, of course, actually pays for them.

The Friday Market itself seems sluggish. One particularly unfortunate shopper is wearing a T-shirt designed in aid of some disease research foundation, with a message like "Don't look sick? So, what does pain look like?" I look at the shopper and feel queasy--or maybe it's just residual food poisoning. You put on a T-shirt like that because you expect people to think you look healthy. This shopper does not look healthy. That face could well be the look of pain.

There are two operating philosophies about the Friday Market. Some vendors find it profitable to go in early, sell what they can before the heat gets to them, pack up and get out before they collapse. Tougher vendors find it profitable to stay open until midday, when the people who work in town can come out and shop. I've always been in the latter category but unfortunately the only regular vendor willing to share a space with me is in the former, and starts to wilt before ten o'clock. After watching a heat stroke happen at Duffield Daze last summer, I will never again push a friend to stay for the full length of time vendors have paid for. I tell myself the town yuppies probably won't come to trade on a day when that would mean breaking a sweat, and help my frail flower of a friend clear out at eleven, but I've not sold anything yet and I am not a happy camper. 

It doesn't help that a friend, not the same one who invited me on the shopping trip in the nearby city, has bought me prezzies from the trip. Nice, thoughtful prezzies. Gluten-free food, some of which I can even use, and nice little objects I might be able to...sell? Maybe? If people were, like, buying today? I like this woman. I like that she thought about me in the city. I also want to hit her with an overripe cucumber, because, if we grant for the sake of argument that I need to be alive at all, for the purpose of staying alive I need cash not unsold merchandise. I also need that cash to be exchanged fairly for things I do, or have done, not handed out with an unspoken message of "Nice old useless has-been, now go home and lie down and die." I want to scream, "Thank you so much, how did you not guess that the main pleasure of my middle-aged life is reading the obituaries of people who give me that kind of attitude?"

I'm fifty-something, not a hundred and something. I stand as straight and tall as I ever did, endure the heat better than some young people do, can still work a lot of them into the ground; I never wanted to be a nurse aide or massage therapist badly enough to shell out a thousand dollars a year to maintain certification, but I could still do those jobs as well as I did them when I was thirty, much better than when I was twenty. Don't see me staying home on account of a little nuisance like salmonella do you? Seen young people rush to the hospital with salmonella haven't you? Well, then. I swear, the only reason I've gone on eating this long has been to spite my latest official self-appointed enemy. Love, peace, good will, and public spirit are the privileges of people who participate in the exchange of goods and services that makes a community.

Children, I remember so well, think being allowed to shop in the Friday Market is a rare treat, and vendors always try to offer things for the children, but there aren't actually a lot of children in the market, most days, even in summer. Between eight and eleven a.m. there might be tourists, but today all I see are the retired-and-disabled crowd. 

Possibly someone in that crowd can use vegetables--fresh ones, anyway. We set the veg up front in antique containers. I tell people the fresh cucumbers and certified-organic zucchini are four for a dollar or free if they buy the pot. None of the retired and disabled crowd shows the slightest interest. At least two shoppers recognize these veg from the food bank. They won't tell before I do, but I know they know.

There's no real way of checking--I've thought of volunteering with the Samaritans Hotline just to get this kind of information, but I know this crowd have been training themselves for years to say anything, anything at all, except their true feelings. I wonder how many of them are in exactly the same situation I am. They're not stupid or ignorant people; the food bank, like the bookstore people managed to operate for a few weeks, obviously does a brisk trade in good books; plenty of people in Gate City will admit they don't read much, but you don't have to talk to them for long to realize that that's because they don't want to pay for a new prescription for glasses--or get used to wearing glasses. Many of them went to college, some to university. Most of the men are veterans; many of the women have taught school or managed stores; many are, as I am, "retired" or just plain tired health care professionals. Their bodies are no longer perfect, but I see only three people who have any trouble walking around in the hot sun, reading price tags, making conversation, carrying their purchases through the market, or driving their own cars. 

I also see that a full third of the people who even look at the merchandise and talk to the vendors, where I am, don't "need" anything any of us is trying to unload. They have stuff they'd like to unload, or projects they're trying to recruit people to support. Unlike me, they have incomes, probably from pensions or rental property; I think there's an actual farmer on the other side of the marketplace, but he's not shopping. Like me, they "need" cash and recognition if they "need" anything at all. They're not getting those things and so, although most of them have good hair and classic cheekbones, their faces are painful to look at; they wear a look that probably is the look of pain.

Gate City is an "outlier" in many ways, beginning with the way our small, underfunded, overcrowded schools traditionally dominate state competitions in every field...but y'know what? All around the world, in all the English-speaking countries...a few of my e-friends are young people who blog "socially" about their social lives, but the vast majority of them, both in the paid writing and in the Tea Party crowds, are in this same "premature retirement" and/or partial disability situation. This is not just a Gate City Thing. This situation is global.

Social workers have a grotesquely misplaced faith in numbers and large-scale "programs." Because the majority of poor people in the United States have addictions, or really major (meaning mental) disabilities, or both, social workers act as if, and tell religious people to act as if, anyone who's not wealthy by age thirty should never be expected to do anything or allowed to handle cash. Even Republicans blather about "rewarding work" in terms of "job training," as if I, as if most of the people I see in the Friday Market, just needed to be "trained" to compete with teenagers for student-labor-type jobs. That's the kind of idiotic idea a person gets by taking anything a social worker says seriously. 

Social workers don't have a clue what we look like, either, any more than they have a clue about how many cucumbers one person can eat. Really, Republicans, you need to verify it before you act on a social worker's report about whether it's currently raining outside. Social workers are likely to consult some sort of "program" instead of looking outside to find out about that.

What I need from our government (state, federal, or local) is probably what the other unhappy middle-aged people I've been looking at all day need from our government. It's not a concept that the brain of a social worker can absorb. Maybe elected officials, themselves, have enough working brain cells to understand a concept that's more like Earnhardt's Law: Lead, follow, or get out of the way. 

Leading, in this case, would mean--retroactively--keeping my late husband's vampire ex-wife from stealing his estate, and--retroactively--keeping people for whom I've done odd jobs from exploiting Virginia's lack of a small claims court and failing to pay me a hundred dollars here or five hundred dollars there. Any government that wants me to have any faith in government, whatsoever, needs to begin by paying me what has been owed to me for, in the case of my husband's estate, more than ten years--with interest. No drivel about "needs." We are talking about what I've well and truly earned. You may say, "Thank you, Ma'am." You may say, "I humbly beg your pardon that it's taken so long."

Following, in this case, would mean a policy based on asking people who actually have inadequate incomes what we need, rather than listening to social workers. Not that I want to be unkind--they hate me, and some of them have said so, but I'm not a hater--social workers are probably most useful to the world in the capacity of carrying heavy objects and cleaning restrooms. What those of us who've become "disabled" relative to one specific job but not others, or "retired" before we really are disabled, actually need is the opposite of what feeble-minded addicts need. What I, personally, need is a bookstore. And before anybody gets any ideas about loading me up with back issues of National Geographic, I have books by the pound, by the barrel, or by the cubic yard; what I need, for the purposes of opening the said bookstore, is cash.

Getting out of the way, in this case, would mean just quietly removing obstacles to productive self-employment, such as anything in the way of a business license costing more than a driver's license. (Managing a store is a lot easier than managing a moving vehicle.) 

And the politics my conservative heart can endorse are the kind that involve government leading, following, and getting out of my way.