I grew up on food stamps, from the age of about 5 until I was older than 12. I don’t remember the exact ages, and no one who could remember for me is still alive. For those of you not from the United States, “food stamps” are a form of welfare that subsidizes groceries for those below some arbitrary income level. At the time, they were given out as these little booklets of paper vouchers. My understanding is that today, they are issued an “EBT” card which looks much like a debit card, but is still visibly distinct from those, especially for anyone who’s ever been a cashier at a grocery store.

I’ll never go on welfare again. I would rather starve.

I would rather have starved then, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then.

In small towns, no one goes to the grocery store that there’s not someone also there in line who doesn’t know you.

Almost as bad was the “free lunch” program. At least in the 1980s, all the kids would file in and pay theirs just before the lunch room, I think it was a quarter. I’d be the one kid who’d file through the line without paying, and even in first grade, everyone noticed. Not just the kids though, the lunch lady taking the money and putting it in the little lockbox always had this cunty face going on too.

Welfare can’t work when the people making it happen do not love the people they’re doing it for. Then it becomes, at best, a farmer feeding his livestock. At worst, it’s the farmhand kicking the livestock before dumping the food on their head, jealous that they’re “so well taken care of”.