A letter to the editor in today’s Rapid City Journal:
Life in a pre-SCHIP home taught lessonsLife in a pre-SCHIP home taught lessons We need to look at life before SCHIP. I remember a lady in the 1930’s who lost her husband at a young age, leaving her with eight children, the oldest 12. She lived in a small town in a small house. She had no car and worked in grocery stores, the courthouse and in the local bank (years later) until her death.
The mother was too proud to accept commodities. She couldn’t afford health insurance for herself or children and the family had a radio and telephone and running water (you ran out to get it and ran in with it). They had an outside toilet (a 2-holer). There were no school lunch programs. Breakfast was usually dry cereal and lunch was “leftovers” from the previous evening meal. Remarkably, all eight children attended college, the three boys under the GI bill. The mother was still working beyond age 65, so drew no Social Security. How do I know all this? She was my mother. I learned from her, becoming a single parent with three small children (oldest was five). We had no health insurance for the children. SCHIP is unearned welfare — called socialism.
DEAN VANCE
Spearfish
There is an irreplaceable dignity in doing things for your self, even in poverty. Having grown up poor, I know this.
Social welfare programs like SCHIP rob people of this dignity, and when they are extended to people making more than $80,0000 a year, it moves into the realm of the grossly absurd.
Quoting stacymomof2:Well unless your family had a doctor in it you weren't getting health care. Why glorify pre-schip days when it was not uncommon to lose a child to disease because you couldn't afford a doctor? Where's the pride in that? Do you have any idea what the child mortality rates were? Or life expectancy rates were for kids that did survice childhood?
Quoting Claire-Huxtable:
Families took care of each other and people didn't expect others to provide for them jusy because they struggled.
My father abandoned our family when I was 5 years old and so I was raised by a single mother. My mom worked sometimes 3 jobs at a time, but there were many times that she needed to get help in the form of welfare, food stamps and medicaid. We weren't living high on the hog, we were dirt poor; one pair of shoes with holes in them poor. When I was 14 I got my first job through CETA and was able to give my mother money to help pay the bills. Go ahead and call us lazy and socialists, it just shows that you (the general you that thinks people on welfare are lazy bums) don't know what you're talking about.
Because it so damn dignified to beg at a church door or to lose your child to a preventable disease...
What utter bullshit.
Well, maybe it is a little funny.
Quoting turtle68:
Quoting AdrianneHill:
People literally starved to death. It was also legal to sell tour kids as unpaid labor so that happened allot. Same idea then as is now: if those poverty stricken losers weren't bad people, God wouldn't have let them get so poor in the first place. This has to be their own fault. Their plight is actually a character flaw that needs to be shamed and beaten out of them so they don't try to act like their betters and can pull them up by the provided bootstraps."
I love America and her empathy
LMAO.
Quoting garnet83:People would rather insult the woman's parenting than acknowledge the dignity of being a hardworker who doesn't think anyone owes her anything. Wow.
During the depression my great grandparents couldn't feed their children. So one at a time they got orphaned. My grandpa grew up without a family, without a home, and without an education. He became a hoarder as an adult because he was so traumatized by growing up with nothing.
And as started earlier, you aren't allowed to be that poor anymore and still keep your kids. And that happened a lot before the depression, the poor just lost their rights to their kids when they were adopted out to big farms in the Midwest and put to work. The missionaries who handled the adoptions thought that kind of life must be better than living in the city
Quoting garnet83:People would rather insult the woman's parenting than acknowledge the dignity of being a hardworker who doesn't think anyone owes her anything. Wow.
Families, neighbors and the church -- yes, church a religious institution cared, supported, fed and housed people that were in need as a result of a husband/wife passing away or simply have financial woes. Families did not shun one another because they were brought up with values, and love around the `family dinner table'. You worked to survive, not live to work the way people do today. The schools did not yet indoctine children to value their worth by how much money they earned etc.
Quoting MeAndTommyLee:Families, neighbors and the church -- yes, church a religious institution cared, supported, fed and housed people that were in need as a result of a husband/wife passing away or simply have financial woes. Families did not shun one another because they were brought up with values, and love around the `family dinner table'. You worked to survive, not live to work the way people do today. The schools did not yet indoctine children to value their worth by how much money they earned etc.
Dont romanticize so much. people died too. Whole big loving families.
How far you go in life depends on your being: tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of both the weak and strong. Because someday in life you would have been one or all of these. GeorgeWashingtonCarver
Is Yoga a religion?
- paganbaby
on Oct. 12, 2012 at 12:27 AM