Thread by @seananmcguire

In re: my last retweet:

I grew up on welfare. When people talk about "welfare mothers" and "let's drug test them all because they must be cheats," I hear the world's worst "your mom" joke beginning.

I can say a lot of things about how we wound up on welfare. I shouldn't have to: not only were they my mother's choices, not mine or my sisters, but we have a SOCIETY.

In a SOCIETY, our weakest and our most at risk can, ideally, grab hold of a rope to keep them from drowning.

We were drowning.
I was nine years old and I was drowning.
My baby sisters were three and four, and they were drowning.

There was no one in our family equipped to take us full-time; my grandparents helped as much as they could, but they didn't have the resources for three kids.

So we grabbed the rope. We got money from the state and we got canned goods from food pantries and we got food stamps that never lasted, and we got shame, and shame, and shame.

How dare you buy a cake poor kids don't have birthdays.
How dare you share with your neighbor poor people can't be charitable.
How dare you buy a name brand instead of the cheapest generic.

Food stamps don't buy toothpaste or deodorant or menstrual hygiene products, and the actual welfare money didn't cover our real bills, so yeah, technically, there was probably some fraud at some point.

I'm talking the kind of fraud where my mother goes "I will buy you groceries if you will buy me tampons so my eleven-year-old doesn't have to go to school covered in her own blood."

If you think this is a reason for welfare reform that is NOT some form of food stamp-like debit card that covers basic hygiene necessities, I hate to be rude, but fuck you.

But here's the thing:

My mother never received child support. First because her ex-husband was in jail, and later because the state garnished it so she could PAY BACK THE WELFARE WE RECEIVED.

She has no problem with this. She never wanted his money. She just wanted her children to have a prayer at getting out of the hole she'd fallen into.

I have been paying into social security and medicaid and all the other social programs that save people like me since I was eighteen. I stopped living with my mother and benefiting from welfare when I was fifteen.

I have, at this point, more than repaid the state for any costs it incurring in keeping me alive to adulthood, and have done so gladly and without complaint.

But if I couldn't? If I had been more damaged by the circumstances that put us on welfare in the first place, if I had been disabled, if, if if? I would still be living in a SOCIETY.

Social security is not welfare.
Medicare is not welfare.
Disability is not welfare.
In many ways, welfare is not what people think when they hear the word. SOCIETIES WANT THEIR PEOPLE TO FARE WELL. IT'S IN THE NAME.

We need welfare reform, yes. We need to make it easier for people receiving assistance to actually BE ASSISTED, to not become trapped in a brutal cycle of poverty, privation, and prejudices.

But the words "social security" should never be within a goddamn country mile of the word "welfare." There is a big difference between needing help and trusting your society to give it, and paying to be able to survive retirement.

I am a child of a broken welfare system, who will probably never see a cent of the social security I have paid for my entire adult life, in part because of rich assholes trying to reframe it as a form of public assistance.

It is not public assistance.
It is not welfare.
We paid for it.
It's ours.

I'm not sure I have a point here, other than "I'm angry," but as we move into the coldest, cruelest part of the year, please remember that people need help. Maybe you need help. Don't be afraid to help.

This winter, let's finally stop being assholes, and become the people Mr. Rogers told us we could be.