rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2002-05-15 (00:20)
In which our plucky young hero would take that job in a second.

Well, civilization has come to an end: it's no longer legal for the government to discriminate against welfare recipients.

I know, many of us thought that the end of civilization would come when Death rode a pale horse; others among us pictured a nuclear fireball killing billions of us, followed by a nuclear winter that only the cockroaches would survive; others favored a plague, or a military coup.

But such is not to be. Canada ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, and that whimper is that welfare recipients are human beings, the same as you or I.

I always wonder about people who complain about welfare. To be specific, I wonder why these complainers are so stupid. Allow me to explain.

Welfare, as the complainers describe it, is the lottery and a rec room all rolled into one. You need never work. You need never go to school. Whether you have four doctorates or you can't even tie your own shoes, you qualify for it. Your only responsibilities when Sweet Lady Welfare is your sugar momma are to cash the cheques and pop out more kids to increase the dollar amounts on those cheques.

Now, to me, this sounds pretty much like a perfect dream job. You're being paid to do nothing! You get constant sex and your salary increases the better you get at it! What sort of idiot would look at this world of constant sex and money and say "No, gosh, I'd rather work 62 hours a week at the tin can factory, but only get paid for 40 because otherwise the factory will shut down and move to Taiwan"?

A really stupid idiot, is what sort.

The life that these people complain about is the life of Riley. Welfare is a magic lottery ticket that's not just there on the sidewalk, it's crawling up your pant leg to force itself into your pocket. It's opportunity knocking so hard your door is dented. And these people turn it down. It's as if every single month, someone went to their front door to cram eight hundred dollars into the mailbox... and in response, they nailed the mailbox shut.

Mind you, this is just one possibility.

It might very well be that welfare is not, in fact, the sweet life that one might first imagine. It might be a dehumanizing system that, whether by chance or by design, produces a bureaucracy that reminds you at every turn that you are sub-human, unworthy of dignity or consideration. The life of welfare might be dusty and half-empty food banks, desperate prayer that your child doesn't fall ill, impotent rage at the fact that if you stay home, you make 99% of what you need to live, but if you take the only jobs you can find you'll make 80% of what you need.

I think the complainers know this. I think they realize that welfare recipients aren't, in fact, the luckiest people on earth. They're human beings caught in a horrible situation, and some of them quite literally are not permitted to escape it.

But then you trip over that phrase human beings.

And that might lead to thinking about human rights.

And that might lead to madness like a court decision that says the government must treat welfare recipients like any other human being, just like it would treat you or I.

And we just can't have that, can we? So much nicer to complain about Sweet Lady Welfare. So much nicer to complain about what a sweet life welfare must be. As long as you don't have to live it yourself, of course.

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