A friend reached out to me the other day to share her story of being denied SNAP benefits and health insurance for her child.
They live in a small rural county here in West Virginia. Small equates to limited opportunity, in case you hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Her husband has been unemployed for months, so she went seeking work and secured a part-time job as a clerk. When she told me that she had been denied, I told her something wasn’t right. Sure enough, when her husband called, he was told that there had been “a glitch.”
My friend told me that she wasn’t worried about herself because she would starve before she let her kid go hungry, and I know that’s the truth. I also know that it’s a damn shame that she or any of us have to think like that. She’s a woman of strong faith and is surrounded by a strong community and will be fine. But how many more are wondering right now how they’ll feed their family in the morning?
Another friend told me that she had turned in her SNAP paperwork right before the reviews were postponed due to COVID-19. She had been receiving $74 a month as a single mom, separated, with two young children, and, because she turned her paperwork in a week before it was due, her SNAP benefits were discontinued due to an increase of income at the very onset of the pandemic although her work stopped because she was not labeled as an essential employee.
Threat of Death
I was told the other night about a conversation a friend had with the owner of the store she manages. The night before, her store had been robbed at gunpoint. An employee had a gun to her head for two minutes after the robber had taken $52, left, and returned to kill her. She said to me, “I spent four hours today trying to convince a multi-billion-dollar, global corporation that the $52 dollars he got wasn’t the only asset they should have worried about.”
My friend said they could have at least asked for her employee’s name. And then she said, “She has twin boys. 5 yrs old. Her favorite thing is pineapples and she hates green vegetables.”
Working for $10.50 an hour and facing death makes you wonder how essential we really are, doesn’t it?
We have a president who boasts about recovering from COVID-19 while not even thinking about the fact that he was given free top-notch care, and an experimental drug that isn’t available to any of us. He also is awaiting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court about repealing the ACA, a move that will rip health care from the hands of over 20 million Americans in the midst of a pandemic.
Babies are locked in cages, eight million people are said to have “slipped” into poverty during COVID-19, and the U.S. District Court ruled last Sunday against the Trump Administration, stating that they had been “icily silent” about a SNAP rule change that would have removed nearly 700,000 Americans from food assistance. That’s some “love your neighbor” and “feed the poor” stuff right there, right?
Bad Decisions
A local business owner was the focus of a social media campaign to bring light to prejudicial hate speech on his business sign. I read over and over again that he didn’t deserve to have his livelihood destroyed over a sign. His sign made reference to having to work to pay for welfare recipients. I choked on the irony that maybe now he will be forced, because of his vocalized prejudice, to seek help from the broken system. There’s no better wakeup call than to have to learn how jacked up the system is when you’re in desperate need of help.
I hear all the time that this is the first time that many of us have been “political.” I can only hope that it means we’re learning basic political education and not just throwing up a presidential meme and talking about the evils of one candidate over another. If you don’t remember how a bill becomes a law then you’re probably being divisive rather than political. If you can’t name an issue outside of abortion, then you’re probably being divisive rather than political.
And we have enough division.
People are struggling to survive out here. The essential worker raises are gone. The glitches in the system are causing hardship that too many of us understand too well. We need to learn the names of our neighbors. We need to speak up about the injustices that are crippling America’s working class. And the best way to do that is by casting an informed ballot rather than merely a red or blue one.
Educate yourself. Vote to heal.
Onward,
Amy Jo
