Walmart Clerks and Welfare Cheats

About ten days ago we here in Maine were bombarded with news about a young woman from Scarborough who while attending college in Providence had written a blog post on a College Conservatives website that had gone viral. The entry telling of her experiences as a Walmart checkout person and what she saw became something that was read all over the country.

The young lady wrote about people using welfare in what she considered inappropriate ways by buying fancy foods such as lobster, using the welfare card at the same time as they paid cash for fancy electronic equipment and the like. We all know that many of the people who are on welfare do not use the cards the way we would. Or at least the way we think we would.

The problem with this girls entry is that it plays into stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes is, hang onto your hat here, is that usually there is enough of a truth in them to make them dangerous. A good deal of Nascar fans are rednecks. Not all but enough so that people get the joke. The fact is that a stereotype does not work if it does not have a strong grain of truth running through it. People would not get the reference and it would fade away.

So it is established that there is welfare abuse. Welfare dependency is generational and the fact that she sees children playing EBT card games is something that should give us all pause.

The problem is bigger than somebody getting a birthday cake with their welfare money or having lobster. We do not know. If it is her childs birthday would you deny that kid a cake. Even if it was on welfare money?

As much as the stereotype works we must understand that there are a strong percentage of people who use welfare the right way. The question is how do you fix the problems. If a person has or can only get a low wage job and has children then yes it becomes difficult to get them to work when they can get the same amount of money to stay home. Do some women have kids to perpetuate this. Yes they do. Still much of the reason that they do is that they are uneducated and fearful of life off the system.

Our problems are deeper than welfare abuse. Every time you take a trip to Walmart, for example , you see people and children that you know have very little chance of breaking out of the cycle of dependence.

Do you solve it by making it harder for a generation so that the cycle is broken. Perhaps you do. Nothing else seems to stop it.

So now we return to the check out girl. If her motive was altruistic in writing this it would be easier to embrace. However when she puts her life's goal as being the next Ann Coulter it is easy to see what the end goal of this blog is. It is to get attention and to be controversial. She succeeded. She is not a bad person. She has seen abuses and she feels strongly about what she has seen. The problem is that there will always be wide swath of the population who will take a true stereotype as gospel.

Just like those who say they have nothing against black people before they go on to criticize black people many will say for those who really need it they do not mind welfare. The problem is can you standing behind someone at the checkout counter really determine in that brief glimpse if someone needs or deserves welfare.

Could someone who sees me hobble in on my cane and sit and watch my sons basketball game determine if I am disabled enough to receive a check. Are they at home with me later that night when my wife helps me undress and rubs my legs as they recover from the pain of walking and sitting.

Yes there are abuses. Yes the cycle of dependence needs to be broken. Yes the poor have become a voting block to be protected and in some cases exploited by politicians. The fact is though with all of these fixes needed I cannot be judge and jury and nor can anyone else. In this case when the people in charge need to make rational, non emotional, long term decisions stereotypes do not help. Even when they come from attractive wanna be pundit college girls.