President Trump's new reduction in welfare programs,
announced in the news today (May 23, 2017), might turn out to be the best
incentive in the past fifty years to encourage people to start to work for a
living again.
In physics, every action usually induces a reaction. Satisfying
the altruistic instincts of social workers can become an albatross around the
necks of other citizens--such as the business owners on Lubbock’s 34th Street
(in the news today). 34th
Street merchants told us that the homeless are no longer just panhandling there; they are demanding handouts. Some merchants interviewed
by local TV reporters claim the indigents are even breaking into the
businesses. Maybe they figure they are just as entitled to a free ride as those
at Lubbock’s Grace Campus, a free housing community for the homeless. In
Depression days, we would have called these, collectively, a “poor house.” Unlike the erstwhile Depression era poor
houses, this one occupies a large block adjacent to an industrial area and
comprises a large number of wooden mini-houses. Originally, the social workers
housed these occupants in box-like tents.
In the 1930s, FDR, under a federal program called FERA,
essentially re-named the former poor farms to the more politically correct, “resettlement
communities.” The Government pumped a lot more money into them and assigned a
federal bureaucrat called, a Home Economist, to oversee the local leader,
called a Community Manager. See:
The original “community house” of the Ropesville, TX
Resettlement Community has been moved a short distance, but it is still in
Ropesville, near the original, Resettlement Community. A plaque commemorates it
as one of FDR’s New Deal Programs. It sits adjacent to the large, once
Government-owned, Poor Farm that juts deep into the center of the small town of
Ropesville, TX.
Erskine Caldwell was one of the few Depression Era novelists
bold enough to highlight the fears that the once proud farmers had of “ending
up on the poor farm." They feared living with what they considered deadbeats
abusing the welfare system in Government housing. Some literally preferred
death to going to the poor farm, as in Caldwell’s "Tobacco Road." The novel is much better and more realistic
than the movie.
Nowadays, major publications, such as the NYT, snub novels that
update welfare abuse, but make “best sellers” of authors that stick to the
politically correct viewpoint of glorifying social workers and depicting all recipients as "unfortunate."These publications are
in bed with the liberals who are not about to admit the failure of most of our mushrooming
social welfare programs since WWII. More
than half of federal spending now goes to welfare, or so-called “safety net” programs
that include Social Security (initiated during the FDR Administration) and its concomitant welfare programs.
Thanks to the advent of POD publishing, and such politically
incorrect novels as my own “Undercover Hobo,” the public can now share a few
esoteric, updated glimpses into the enormity of current welfare abuse. You
might say I was “blessed” (from a writer’s viewpoint) with several years as a
border guard checking boxcars, beating the bushes of hobo jungles, dislodging illegal aliens from unimaginable nooks, crannies and crevasses--and, most importantly, interacting with real hobos. I learned that accident-appearing, decapitations are often cover-ups for murders. I worked mostly
nights so I could attend daytime college classes and study creative writing.
There will always be homeless people. Most, however, are homeless
by choice, occasionally facilitated by social welfare programs. Most free spirits do not grow roots in the rescue missions of the larger cities and become “home guards”
(permanent party) in the Skid Row rescue missions. Many are simply afflicted
with wanderlust and a strong desire to survive by their own instincts. To be
sure, there are misanthropes, like members of the FTRA, but they include wanderers who are occasionally
willing to exploit the symbiotic relationship between social workers and the
drifters (symbiotic, because these types accept handouts and create jobs for social
workers). One of my characters, “Sandhouse,” introduced in Chapter 3 of “Undercover
Hobo,” illustrates this phenomenon. These types will tolerate social compassion
for only a short time; then they resume roaming.
In the Great Depression, city and county governments shared
the cost of poor houses and poor farms with the federal government. Dodging the local costs of welfare spawned
the practice of officers from poorer counties transporting indigent transients to
adjacent county lines, surreptitiously dropping them off, and telling them how
to reach the poor farms, or poor houses, of the neighboring counties.
You must have lived for a long time to note the changing
attitudes toward accepting welfare in America. When Erskine Caldwell wrote
Tobacco Road, there was a strong indignity attached to welfare for most people.
He wrote the book in 1932, the year FDR ousted Hoover after one term, when people
called poor farms what they were; when “the poor” was a compound noun. Most of
the people get that way nowadays through indolence and lack of ambition; not by
some catastrophic event, like the Great Depression. The importation of poverty from third world
countries, outside legal channels, has expedited America’s drift to socialism,
and it is approaching completion. The election
of Hilllary would have expedited it, but the attitudes are still there and the march
toward socialism and its attached chains, is inexorable.
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