Don’t let them eat

Sonny’s timing could have been better.

You don’t have to be a PR professional to realize it just plain looks bad to announce a plan to take food away from poor people a few weeks before Christmas … you know, the whole Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit thing. But there was USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue playing Mr. Scrooge, announcing a plan to take food off the tables of 700,000 Americans just in time for them to miss their Easter dinner.

It’s for their own good, of course.

Yeah, it’s another swipe at that favorite whipping boy of the smug and self-righteous – the federal Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program, sometimes referred to as SNAP, but most generally known as food stamps.

Conceived of back in the ‘60s as a way to get surplus food off the farm, off the shelves and into the empty bellies of people in need; from the get-go this program has annoyed the living bejeezus out of folks of a certain mindset. For some reason they just can’t stomach the idea that everybody deserves to eat.

I have a hard time understanding that.

It’s not like we have some sort of famine going on. It’s not food we’re coming up short on, just compassion.

Now that’s going to get ‘em huffin’ and puffin’. This is a moral issue, they say. Not letting people go hungry creates a culture of dependency and there’s nothing like a touch of scurvy, beriberi or just good, old garden-variety malnutrition to put a lazy miscreant back on the path to the straight and narrow.

Or so they seem to believe. Why else would Sonny Perdue justify letting almost three-quarters of a million people go hungry as a good thing because it would be .“moving more able-bodied Americans to self-sufficiency”

And, of course, self-sufficiency is a good thing – unless, perhaps, the individual opts to satisfy that motivating hunger through theft, extortion, prostitution, operating a street corner, freelance pharmacy or any of the few options open to the down-and-out desperate with a sketchy curriculum vitae and few or no marketable skills.

Even so, Sonny insists that leaving folks with nothing to east is a sure way to move people “from welfare to work.” Work is the ultimate virtue. Arbeit macht frei.

Except, it’s really not about work. Not about work at all.

This latest cut is aimed at “able bodied adults without dependents,” which is only partly true. More accurately it is “able bodied adults without dependents and without money.”

Work, it seems, instills virtue in the poor, but for the well-to-do, it’s more or less optional.

Scraping by with the help of Medicaid and food stamps is the short path to shameless social parasitism; lounging poolside supported by trust funds, old-money, or the family fortune and it’s lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Add a little gilt and glamour and unproductive idleness becomes aspirational.

So for the idle rich, we cut taxes.

For the out of work poor, we cut food stamps.

And having done it “for their own good,” we can feel not just a little bit smug. We’re not like “them.” We’re asking no favors, pulling our own weight…until the rope breaks.

What will it take? An accident? An illness? A buy out? A layoff? A new technology that leaves you with the employment prospects of a linotype technician? Maybe the stock market goes bust; maybe your whole life just goes in the tank.

It happens. To all of us.

When anybody says they’ve gone though life without any help they’re either unbelievably lucky or lying.

It’s really not about us and them. It’s about us – and when.