Tag: food stamps

It Could Easily Be You

When I was ten years old, my family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just months after learning to walk again after the car accident. It was the only time we did not live in Chicago during my childhood.

Shortly after moving into a big, beautiful home, we were evicted. With only a few family members in the state who decided we could not live with them, my mother and her three daughters went to a woman’s shelter. My brother was welcomed to stay with an older cousin, but she didn’t have room for the girls.

I’ve gone days without food, months without a roof, and years without the kind of nourishment most people take for granted. So watching people mock families who are about to lose their SNAP benefits isn’t just sad — it’s cruel, and it reminds me how easily empathy gets lost in comfort.

In a matter of days, many American families face the risk of losing their food stamp benefits as the Trump Administration intends to cut payments, affecting about 42 million individuals across the nation. What people are feeling and witnessing is not about lazy parents who are not working to put food on the table. This is about a trash economy that has forced even the hardest-working families to rely on assistance. You might not need it today, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need it tomorrow.

Before the stock market crash of October 1929, there was a time of optimism. Many families prospered as cars and new technology grew. People did not expect to go to their banks and be locked out without warning. Families didn’t expect that they would have to stand in bread lines. It happened suddenly, and it could happen to you, too.

“The loss of SNAP benefits leads to food insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition, which are associated with numerous negative health outcomes in children, such as poor concentration, decreased cognitive function, fatigue, depression, and behavioral problems.”

– Melissa Quinn, CBS News

My cousin put it perfectly on Facebook:

“Food stamps fed all of us. Medicaid paid them hospital bills. WIC kept formula in our baby’s bottles. Free lunch stopped our stomachs from growlin in class. The projects gave most of us a roof when we ain’t have one. Financial Aid got a lot of ya’ll them degrees you flexin now. We’ve all had help at some point, so quit looking down on folks still getting it. You just forgot what struggle felt like. Don’t get too high up…the ground still waiting if you fall.”

– Tiff McCormick, Facebook Post

Memoir Sample – The Aid Office

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Our family survived off welfare and from that end I know it to be helpful. It was however, a possessive lover. In Robert Taylor, no one’s father was present since their mother’s couldn’t receive welfare with them. But not that men weren’t present; their existence was obvious since the projects themselves overflowed with innocence. Thousands of children the byproduct of casual sex, and drive by love pieced together somehow between the cracks of the doors left open by the ladies from the welfare office, who searched everywhere but the crack of your buttocks to ensure it wasn’t present. So the men were around, fathers of children who knew them as nothing more than the Ray Ray’s and Big Mikes of the block. Men who sort of hung out on the corners or underneath the beds of open women, too filled with desire and dreams to deny a no-good-man a place between her legs. So the kids kept coming, the men kept leaving, and the welfare office remained packed. And if it, the Welfare, sensed anything positive had taken place, even if it was a new hairstyle, they needed to know from where the money had come, how much was it and how often was it around so they may deduct that amount from the meager rations they were already giving out. It didn’t matter if it was a jar of peanut butter or a new hat, if it was expected to come from an additional money source, it would be calculated and deducted from the monthly government assistance.

If she was found to have a man living with her, whether he worked or not, she could lose her money altogether. Not only was my father not around, but my Uncle had to make a covenant with the closet when the social worker came by. You see, a man’s  presence was a threat to the relationship between a woman and her government. Thus the poor were required to remain so in the buildings if they desired to receive the little nothings they were receiving from Welfare. If they showed any sense of pride that required a level of discretion at what we commonly referred to as, “The Aid-Office”, it was as if the clerk had been instructed to repeat their business louder than the person obviously desired over the intercom so that the entire room could hear it; this made it extremely embarrassing to visit the office.

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If by any chance the women wanted a divorce by acquiring some fancy job, the government made sure to snatch away all its benefits so that she is better off to remain part of the relationship than to do away with it. What use is a “good job” when she can’t afford to pay the rent if it increases because of her salary? Or what use is a “good job” when she can no longer receive Medicaid for children who are constantly bleeding from the violence of their environment? This is a place where children used garbage dumps as a playground. What use is it, of a “good job”, when she can no longer receive food stamps as a means to feed her children? It is thus better for her to stay married, financially, to the system than to get a “good job” that leaves her just over broke and in the same situation as she started out as. Marriage? Out the question, she can lose her benefits by daring to marry her children’s father—she wasn’t allowed to have one in the home, let alone marry him. Needless to say, the system divided more than it brought together, and was quite jealous and possessive of its lover, the Black Woman.

– Concrete Children: Life Inside the Robert Taylor Projects

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I would like to publish a memoir one day. While I am still  in the infancy stages of understanding memoir writing, I have taken to writing down bits and pieces of my life story and publishing excerpts to this blog for practice.