[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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