Sticks and Stones

This blog post hurt my heart.

When I was 16, I got a job as a grocery store cashier. This was before the handy slidy credit card things, back when food stamps came in actual books. The person had to tear the stamps out of the book in front of me, and I had to verify that the stamps came from that actual book. I also had to make sure that everything the bought qualified. (No hot food, no toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, tampons, no alcohol...the rules are here if you're curious!) It was a tedious and sometimes time consuming process.

I had never really been introduced to the world of food stamps. I had never heard of WIC until I had to learn how to process a WIC check. I knew that food stamps existed, but did not realize that everyday moms and dad used them. I had this idea that only uneducated poor people in the slums used them. I learned a lot about compassion for people doing that job.

I knew what welfare moms were supposed to look like from what I'd read about them and heard about them from other people.What shocked me most was not a bunch of welfare queens buying steaks and heading home in their caddy to neglect their fifty kids from different fathers. I never once saw that.

What shocked (really shocked!) me were the stunningly unkind reactions and words of the people in line behind them. People would criticize their purchases to their face, tell them to say thank you to them for buying their groceries with their taxes, say they wished that they could leech off the system too, but they had a job unlike you terrible welfare people, comment on their family size, tell them that they should have to go to the back of the line and wait since processing the stamps took too long, ask if the children all had the same father, make rude comments under their breath, and generally talk about that person as though they were not standing right there, as though they could not be heard, as though that person was less than a person.

I was not the recipient of those comments, but their words made a definite impact on me. It broke my heart to see how ashamed the food stamp people were, and how those in line behind them would humiliate then. It did not happen every time, but it did happen enough that the lesson is burned into my memory. I was 16, and had never before realized how unkind adults could be. I thought that everybody was supposed to be polite, that everybody was generally kind to strangers. That job showed me how ugly people could be to each other. Until then, I thought people eventually grew out out jerkhood. Crying, humiliated women with a cart full of welfare groceries and a pompous, arrogant mocker behind them showed me differently.

Years later, I am very aware of how easily that could be me. I have savings, I have a home, I have a husband who is employed, I have health insurance. If I lost one or two of those things, that person being shamed by strangers could just as easily be me. It could just as easily be you.

There but for the grace of God go I, indeed.