[thechat] FW: Protesters
Erika Meyer
emeyer at lclark.edu
Thu Oct 11 12:16:32 CDT 2001
>Carrots and sticks work best in combination; not exclusively....
What the wealthy don't understand is the level to which carrots and
sticks are patronizing and demeaning, and the anger they incite.
Our welfare system is a carrot and stick game, and for three years I
was the mule.
I tried so hard to make it while constantly being beat on the ass
with sticks with little crumbs held before my nose as "rewards" for
behaving as the government felt I should behave.
What does the government want welfare moms to do? Put their children
in an institution and take the first dead-end minimum wage job you
can and strip--i.e. expose everything about your life--and jump thru
hoops (fill out reams and reams of paperwork and do everything social
worker tells you to do no matter how ridiculous...)
Oh, and while I was trying to perform between the carrot and the
stick... they refused to help me with child care costs 3 different
times (why did I expect help? because it was the law.). So trying
to work without child care, I also had to build 3 different legal
cases against them, all of which I won, but not before I had turned
into a near basket case.
I looked at my daughter sleeping this morning at 5 years old and
growing up so fast and I felt so sad that I have not been able to
spend more time with her in her sweetest years. Every day she asks
me "when do you get a day off, mommy?"
Yeah, it's my fault. I made bad choices in life. My ex made bad choices, too.
So I deserve the carrot and stick treatment, just like all the other
welfare moms, and all the poor nations of the world, all the rouge
leaders, all the rouge states, all the rouge people, all the rouges.
We must be made to behave as a proper cogs in the global economic system.
So beat us, bomb us, feed us. Show us you care.
Erika
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