Decay From Within

WELFARE IS A CURSE

Like a fool, I went back and forth for most of three minutes, from the apple bin to the scale and to the apple bin again. I had two dollars and I wanted two apples and two pears, for lunch, and if I could find an apple small enough I could just afford it.

The right fruit finally found, I went to the registers and took my place in line.

The woman in front of me was in her 20s, healthy and young, with a fancy fruit drink and a gourmet salad. The salad looked pretty good. She had a leather coat and several pieces of garish gold jewelry.

And then I had one of those American moments.

One of those commonalities that bind us together and drive us crazy and are the foundation of folklore.

While I stood there with my miser lunch, the leather-coated, jewelry-wearing, designer-beverage drinking, foo-foo salad eating healthy young woman opened her money-stuffed purse - and paid with food stamps.

Years ago, it would have made me angry. Now I take it in stride, as just another testament of a curse upon our society.

And welfare is exactly that, a curse which steals money from taxpayers and initiative from recipients. A scourge which damages and divides by promoting resentment and debasing responsibility.

Welfare, in its various forms, is a social cancer quickly metastasizing across our land. Its consequences, now spread over a third and fourth generation, include a savaging of the family unit, a dissolution of social connection, permanent poverty and a culture of criminality. And tragically, it is so broadly and automatically accepted as to be above criticism or reproach.

Welfare is seen as a right. Its recipients are seen as fully functional.

And that must end.

For the benefit of society, for the salvation of recipients, for the preservation of the republic.

The first step is to return to welfare the stigma it once held. The sense of embarrassment and shame. Not for the truly deserving - the handicapped, elderly or infirm - but for all others. For all who have a mind and a body capable of gainful employment.

Being on welfare should be something which tugs at the pride of recipients, which doesn't sit right, which prompts them to do what is necessary to provide for themselves.

That sounds harsh, but it is best. And it is right. Because the fundamental responsibility of life is to provide for yourself and for your family.

When that fact is overlooked - when it is actively attacked by government - the damage is far larger than financial. Granted, tax slaves fret at the burden of entitlements, grand schemes to take money from those who produce and give it to those who do not.

But that effect is temporary.

A wage earner can typically make more money, and even the most heavily taxed worker can usually eke out a pleasant and worthwhile life. The people who pay for welfare are robbed, buy they can replace that which was taken from them.

The people who receive, welfare, however, cannot. Because taken from them and their children is their initiative, their self-respect, their sense of responsibility and commitment. Their chance for ever earning a life which takes them above the lowest economic rungs of this society.

See, when you give someone a welfare check, you usually guarantee that person will always be poor. You steal from them economic mobility - the American Dream.

Welfare is a sin of government. And its great irony is that it fosters resentment between its two groups of victims. Class division, which is not part of the American character, is flamed by a government program which cuts the belly out of both sides.

And it most particularly attacks families.

Among those who pay the taxes which support welfare, the burden of taxation requires two incomes to satisfy - pushing mothers wholesale into the workplace since the dawn of the Great Society.

Among those who receive welfare, there is no need for the wage-earning male - radically cutting marriage rates and raising illegitimacy rates during the same period of time.

On one end, families lose mothers. On the other end, they lose fathers. And all together are held down economically. It is a servitude and bondage which affects both groups profoundly.

Welfare reform has begun.

But welfare doesn't need reformation, it needs extermination.

The push to reduce benefits and rolls must continue. Not as an act of selfishness or stinginess, but as a conscious choice of a better way. The truly needy should never be abandoned, but the reality of what constitutes true need should be acknowledged.

The fall of America, like the fall of Rome, will not be driven by attack from without, but by decay from within.

And welfare is the seed of a fair portion of America's moral decay.

by Bob Lonsberry
http://www.lonsberry.com/writings.cfm?go=4

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Posted March 22, 2008 10:40 AM
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