“Discover the facts. Every human being deserves that much from every other.””

MY VIEW

Trolls and polls

During a visit to my former physical therapist, she launched into that old Fox News saw about “welfare queens” who live the high life on the public dole. Because I feared that she might continue with some version of the Willie Horton story, I reacted quickly, but calmly. “Have you ever worked in Welfare?” I asked. 

She paused. Likely, this middle-class “white” successful business and building owner (good for her!) had not, and so I pushed ahead and said that I had—with a caseload of roughly 100. During those emotionally difficult 18 months of work for the Essex County Welfare Board in Newark, NJ, I never ever met a welfare queen. I had met people in all the categories of public assistance—the blind, disabled, aged, mothers and their dependent children, etc., but never anyone living it up, supposedly, like a “queen.”

Whether at the beginning of their lives, or near the end, they all had the harsh reality of poverty in common. Back then, we did not call it “food insecurity,” but we had hunger nonetheless. 

In 2022, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) budget rose to an all-time high. This year the budget for SNAP increased a whopping 44 percent to $147 billion. Before your “fiscal conservative” self might leap to cut the SNAP budget, you should note that 41.4 million people depend on that program. 

Also, the $147 billion on our total $9.32 trillion federal budget represents a miniscule 1.2 percent budget allocation. On average, each SNAP participant received an estimated $127 per month (or about $4.16 a day) in regular food benefits in the last fiscal year. As part of the pandemic response, they received an additional $92 per month (or $3.01 a day) per person in temporary pandemic-related benefits, for a monthly total of $218 per person. That is a pandemic emergency-hyped grand total of about $7 per day per person—for over 41 million people. Many of us might spend more than that SNAP daily food allowance for a drink before we have lunch at a restaurant. 

“Yes, but there is the welfare corruption—that’s where the real steal takes place—and there are illegal immigrants and rapists and… those other people. And this is true because we know it’s true!” 

The sad fact is that an indoctrinated person, with an ingrained ideology based upon manufactured assumptions about “other” people, is very difficult to reach on any cognitive level. There is a serious, personal and long-term emotional investment in a twisted phantasy that often trumps reason, logic and facts. Evidence is not necessary; only unsubstantiated claims are required to “hide within your room, safe within your tomb.”

Why not join us in the light of goodwill? Why not go into the light? Discover the facts. Every human being deserves that much from every other.

John Pace lives in Honesdale, PA.