TYNESHA CIERRA ADAMS

We live in a country that prides itself on being great. Many think of America as the land of freedom, opportunity, and abundance. Within our country, however, many families depend on government aid to help them make it through life. It is only right that our great country is ready and willing to help its people in need. The government has implemented programs, such as welfare, health insurance, and affordable housing, in order to benefit the needy. The needy consist of dysfunctional veterans, single mothers with children, and unemployed or underemployed people who cannot earn a living to make ends meet. In the long run, however, all this government help given to those in “need” takes its toll; handouts are not necessarily beneficial for the psyche of recipients.

 

In a perfect world, welfare would only be given to those who are in need of help. Government aid should be used as a means of lending a helping hand to individuals who cannot maintain minimal economic conditions to provide for themselves. The needy should rely on welfare just long enough to take control over their living conditions. Eventually they ought to learn to provide for themselves and get off welfare.

 

Through television, radio, editorials, and gossip, the media creates a stereotypical vision of welfare recipients. The typical image usually consists of a minority family who lives in an urban community. The household is rather large with many children and only one parent. These people do not appear to have money or a viable means of attaining an income. But the reality does not always match the stereotype. There are families and individuals who depend on government aid, like welfare, to survive. Difficult circumstances can lead honest people to depend on help in order to live.

 

I find it ironic that a program created to assure the well-being of all citizens in the richest country in the world can have negative effects on the people whom the program is supposed to support. The concept of “welfare” should by its very nature promote wellness in the citizens who are being helped. However, over time, this process does not prove to be beneficial at all. Some individuals use welfare as an easy way out. For example, I have encountered many young teenage soon-to-be-mothers who look forward to getting on welfare to pay for their children. It upsets me to hear their plan as being the only option that young girls would give themselves. They live an existence so dependent and uninspired that this group creates a negative image of how welfare allows laziness and idleness to fester among the poor working class. These people become lazy, without any desire to go out and become responsible enough to provide the essentials of life for themselves. Some become too comfortable living off the government, and they begin to believe that it is a lifestyle that represents a valid choice. Another reality is that the aid is not always enough. Many recipients receive so little that, in today’s expensive society, they can barely survive. The needy are provided with food stamps for food and a token amount of money for bills, but other survival expenses stand unaccounted for, such as housewares, clothing, and transportation.

I know first hand what it is like to have to depend on welfare. All my life, government aid provided my family with the essentials of life, including food and housing. The aid my family received was not always enough. There were plenty of times when my mom was forced to make a decision about which bill to pay first, risking the consequences of not paying another. Food stamps were not always guaranteed, and sometimes we reached the end of the month with nothing.

 

My mother appears now to me to be the epitome of how living on welfare can so exhaust the human spirit that a person becomes debilitated and lives without hope. The result is an indolence without goals in one’s life.  Always living hand-to-mouth does not inspire dreams to compose a business plan that will lead to the next Microsoft. My mom has received welfare for such a long period of time that each cashed check for so little bankrupts her imagination. There is no other reason that explains why she could stay on welfare for over fifteen years other than to acknowledge the sense of being defeated that comes with feeling comfortable from depending on others for help. I just cannot understand why she was so completely incapable of going out into the workforce and obtaining some kind of upwardly mobile job to provide for her family. I believe my mother is a good person; she should just not be living in a world devoid of hope. No American in the richest country in the world that stands for social justice should be that tired and worn out at an early age. No one deserves to eat despair for dinner.

 

Welfare washes over the personalities and lifestyles of those who have lived and depended on it with invisible waves of negativity. Being on welfare is not something to go around boasting about. Living with assistance from the government creates humiliation and embarrassment. It causes low self-esteem that becomes especially prevalent in the young. I can remember being in elementary school and pained by the fact that all the other parents had jobs and could provide not just what children need, but some extras. It would hurt me to the bone to hear other children make jokes about losers on welfare using food stamps. All throughout my adolescent years, I made it my duty never to let peers know that I was a “welfare” child.

 

Welfare programs should be designed to rehabilitate the people who turn to them for what should be temporary assistance. Courses for job training, life skills, and education should be offered to help individuals transition themselves out of the system. Inner city colleges should apply for grants and do what they supposedly are good at doing: educate people in their environs. When poor people learn to realize that they are capable of rising above the situation that they are in, they can succeed in life. Another way to improve the system is to encourage caseworkers, and working with those who receive welfare, to become involved in the lives of their cases. These people should be educators, rather than just pencil-pushers. Caseworkers should be trained to help motivate people to get better. They should know if the aid is truly needed and what form that aid can take if a person is going to be helped to exist on one’s own abilities. As I see it, the goal is never to be on life support, but to get off life support and on one’s own.

I wonder if welfare will ever become beneficial to people in the future. At this point in time, the bureaucratic nightmare and the social stigma make the entire system into an experience that is horrifying. Welfare in all its aspects needs to be reconstructed so that helpful changes can replace debilitating dependencies. If welfare does not learn to live up to its name, then the country is just paying a group of needy people a subsistence to remain invisible and on the sidelines of life. Being in the system lets us eat, but other than that, a life of dependency has nothing but negative effects that multiply from living too long in the system.