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by lainproliant
2606 days ago
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I grew up here. Cincinnati is a place full of really hard working people who care about family and have a lot of pride. The comment about the father not wanting to accept aid because he is too proud hurts because my family was the same way. I didn't get basic medical or dental care until college unless I was taken to the ER. There were many nights we went hungry and many times we had to sleep on grandma's floor because we had nowhere else to go. I do wish that families would discard their pride with regards to helping their children and accept as much aid as possible to ensure that they are healthy and prepared for the future. |
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When people attach stigma to public assistance for political purposes, this is what happens. People with a demonstrable, provable need for charity refuse it. Whenever someone prattles on television about people on the dole being lazy, someone who is emphatically not lazy refuses a handout that might have allowed their child to get a dental checkup.
It may not occur to them that the person on the television is so far removed from the realities of poverty that they don't even know how false their words are when they say them. And so poor people, who actually do want to work, are constantly looking for jobs, turning over ever possible lead, and yet still unable to meet living expenses. And then, rather than giving up, they try even harder.
You can examine case after case, and find, time after time, that there is nothing there that anyone could point to and say "Aha, solve this one problem, and this person would not be poor!" You can find a lot of instances where the family was teetering on the knife-edge of solvency, and then just one unexpected event, completely beyond their control, sent them tumbling into an abyss. For a disturbingly large fraction, that is a medical expense--and occurs even if they had medical insurance. For a still-significant fraction, it is a major employer closing down local operations and moving the work elsewhere.
That's not a situation that one can blame on the poor. It comes from a systemic disrespect for the least-valued humans in the community--a disrespect that is compounded by a myth that they alone are responsible for all their hardships.
It is not pride to believe that a poor man should be treated at least as well as a rich dog. And it is not charity if it requires that the recipient throw away their sense of self-worth. There are a lot of things your family could have done for money--prostitution, smuggling contraband, stealing, fraud, etc.--and that sense of self-worth also kept them from doing those things. To discard that "pride", and do anything to survive, means to literally do anything to survive. If your moral foundation is to have things because you earned them lawfully, and you then shift to taking things because you really need them, that does not necessarily stop at things given voluntarily, or in keeping to the law.