Social Welfare and Me

I was the son of a single mother.  I grew up in section 8 housing eating because of food stamps and warm in the winter because of subsidized heating.  It’s not that my parents were lazy bums.  My father was around, usually somewhere nearby, but he didn’t really contribute anything.  My mother worked at a factory named aerovox where she performed assembly line work and–ended up with carpel tunnels.  Eventually she was able to put herself through CDL training school and she became a produce delivery truck driver and–ended up with 2 herniated disks.  Finally when she couldn’t do that anymore she managed to get another assembly line job buffing the seams off of 5000 to 8000 gold balls every day.  At least this time she didn’t get a debilitating injury, and this time the job actually paid pretty well (about 30K a year to start)  I can’t personally imagine how monotonous it must have been buffing balls for 8 hours a day/5 days a week + overtime.  But she did it, and she did it well.  Well enough that we were able to get off of food stamps,  well enought that we no longer needed section 8, and well enough that I was always able to have (as she always re-iterates) “levis on your ass and Nikes on your feet.”  Hard work plus occasional help from the government equals a decent living in America, and that’s the America in which I want to live.