Welfare rambles

I once spent a few months on welfare.
My hours at work had been slashed to--sometimes--as little as three a week, for no reason I could fathom. My girlfriend at the time got no hours at all: she was unemployed.. Rent had to be paid; we had to eat. Very grudgingly, I applied, and was accepted.
Because I was deemed to be living common-law (I can't remember, but it must have been around that time I got engaged...a horrible mistake), I was--we were--entitled to a little over $900 a month. (Bob Rae was in power then: welfare paid better than many part-time jobs.) Rent was $320, all utililities included; we had very few other living expenses.
In other words, by the standards I had been subsisting on, I was suddenly rich.
And guilty.
To collect my monthly windfall, all I had to do was give proof that I had applied for employment at...I think it was fifteen...different places. No sweat. That took all of half a day every month.
The day after the first cheque came through, we went to Canada's Wonderland. I'm sure a good chunk of that cheque and the two or three after it went to various movie theatres around town, also more than a few restaurants. Livin' high off the public teat, we were, and enjoying every minute of it.
Well, mostly. Actually, I couldn't shut up the voices in my head, the ones that screamed at me for taking money I had no right to. I was raised to think of welfare as a "hand up, not a handout"--but that wasn't the half of it; I was also raised to shun handouts, even if I need them. You didn't take charity: it meant you were visibly poor. To be poor was one thing--tentatively forgiveable. To appear poor was a venial sin; to willingly appear poor was a sin of the mortal variety.
For example, to this day I don't eat the crusts out of loaves of bread. My mother absolutely refused to send her child off to school with bread crusts in his lunch, lest he bring shame and disgrace on the family. Every loaf of bread I've ever seen has a crust at each end, and logically it seems wasteful to throw away perfectly edible bread, but the Voice Of Childhood has spoken. Bread crusts taint you with poverty...if anybody happens to see them. Case closed.
The thought that my mother might discover her son had become a welfare bum tormented me. It wasn't the first thing I hid from my parents--I'd tried to hide the engagement, knowing they wouldn't approve of it; I later attempted to hide the fact I never fully earned the English degree they were in such an all-fired hurry to send me off in pursuit of. This behaviour--the skipping out of school a few credits shy, the getting engaged to a girl all wrong for me, and the trying to cover it up--is a hell of a lot more illogical than throwing out crusts of bread, granted, but the logic spoke quite clearly to me at the time. It said things like it's my life and the longer I hide this, the longer I don't have to deal with their anger and pity (damn ingrate's gonna amount to all of nothing). As for the girl, well, wasn't that obvious? If I buy her a ring, it's bound to shut up that voice I hear in my head telling me she's all wrong for me.

(It didn't, by the way. Don't ever think of engagement, marriage, or childbearing as a big attitude adjuster, because believe you me, all three things will take every flaw you see and amplify them exponentially. If you can live with the amplified flaws--that "gentle sleep-music" your girlfriend once serenaded you with becomes hellaciously loud snoring after the wedding--
then you're okay. If you have trouble living with the little flaws, forget it.)

Meanwhile, here's Ken on welfare. Short of smoking a cigarette, I couldn't think of anything more self-demeaning. Eventually the voices got loud enough that I stopped applying at places I had no hope of working at. I went out and damned well got a job. Relief, sheer relief.

Not long after, Mike Harris came to power in Ontario and completely overhauled the welfare system, cutting benefits for some demographic categories (like mine) nearly in half and instituting "workfare". Squeals of outrage greeted Harris's every move, but none of them came from me. At least half of the money I'd been filching was wasted.

It amazes me the things that people consider necessities, these days. Take, for example, my own twin scapegoats for All That Is Wrong With Society: television and cell phones. To ask somebody to live a day, let alone a life, without either of them is to invite a kick in the privates. It won't surprise me much come the day a judge rules the removal of a prisoner's television an infringement of his rights. And of course, the television has to come with a bunch of acronyms: PVR. DVD. VCR, HD. All of which cost $$$.
Would life be a little more boring without your TV? Sure it would. Would you suffer? I sure hope not. If watching other people's lives is more exciting to you than living your own, it's time for a jolt of excitement. Or a funeral shroud.
Cell phones. Remember back when important people carried them? Now everybody can feel important...for a price. That price, often enough, seems to be "$0"...a flimflammery if ever I saw one: zero dollars, but how much of your sense? You're being dinged in more ways than one everytime your little Razr rings. You're also being irradiated every time you hold the thing to your ear. And you're (willingly! cheerfully!) inviting the world with you everywhere you go. If you need a gadget to make you feel important or connected, you need a jolt of self-esteem.

Do you need a car? If you live and work in a city, you don't. It's admittedly sorely tempting to think of your automobile as a necessity, but truly, in a world of ever-so-much-cheaper bicycles and busses, going carless just takes an adjustment. If you absolutely need a car for an hour, a day, or a weekend, there are co-ops. You can take all that money you're not spending on gas, insurance, and wear-and-tear and use it somewhere else. And talk about meeting your one-tonne challenge in one swell foop.

Am I advocating this kind of Spartan existence? No, I'm not. But if push came to shove and poor came to broke, you can be sure I would then. And I have, at least, practiced this preachery: I lived for nearly five years without a television, considerably longer without access to a car, and I still don't have a cellphone. Odds are I won't get one until they abolish landlines and I have no choice...I figure about twenty years.

No, none of these things are needs, and they certainly shouldn't be paid for out of the public purse. I believe that everyone is entitled to decent food, clean water, and a basic education: give people much beyond that, and what's the point of initiative? You're stuck relying on people's pride to wean them off handouts, and alas, this isn't the proudest of worlds.