This is not an attack

I repeat

This is not an attack

I like to think of the discourse to follow as more of a defense, as that seems to be all I can do anymore is defend myself. I have to defend my beliefs, I have to defend the people around me, and I know that's not my job, just like it's not your job to "take care of people who refuse to take care of themselves."

I go to school at Fort Hays State University, and for most of my college town and anything west of it, words like "feminism," "liberal," and "welfare" are basically hate speech. I get it. For most of the people in most of those communities, they have all worked hard their entire lives for every cent's worth of everything that they own. We were all raised by people more than willing to lend a hand and absolutely allergic to the idea of asking for help. Anyone from my small community just fifteen miles east of the Colorado border would be willing to hand you the shirt of their back if it were the last thing they owned.

Why, then, are they so opposed to welfare?

Nation-wide health care and food stamps or easier access to better public education or assistance with post-secondary education?

It's not fair, I get it.

It's not fair that several hundreds to thousands of dollars of your hard earned paychecks are taken out every year in taxes to take care of people you don't even know. It's not fair that there are people out there living food-stamp to food-stamp when you, or people you know, are having to go without certain things in your life in order to make ends meet.

I understand that this is how you see welfare.

I understand that for many people, this is what welfare is. There's absolutely no way I'm going to say that people don't use and abuse the social systems set in place for their own benefit and I'm not claiming that it doesn't happen often that a person relies heavily on government support because they refuse to get back on their feet and do something about their situation.

You should understand that this is how I see welfare.

Across America, not just in the inner-cities and not just in the trailer parks, children are going without suppers or living on foods like ramen noodles and hot pockets every day, because their parents are working way too hard for way too long to not be able to afford quality food, but somehow that's still the case. Of course, some of these parents are not working, and that sucks, I get it. These children, though, cannot work, because so many of them are not physically able or old enough to earn any kind of income so the welfare checks and food stamps are all they have to live off of.

It makes sense for people to be upset about their tax money going to folks who have no work ethic, but doesn't it make more sense that the government do what it can to help children who have no say in the matter and have no power over their situations?

And while it doesn't make sense for the government to steal your money to fund the free riders on the food stamps programs, what makes even less sense is that children and people in one of the richest and most developed countries on the planet are dying from preventable diseases and passing away daily because they didn't have access to low-cost, quality health care and the screenings or education necessary to nip these diseases in the bud.

And, being that most of my defenses have to deal primarily with children and most people who know me know that what I want to do after college deals with child welfare, the first argument anyone is going to make is "well, people who can't afford children shouldn't have them!" Which is not such a ridiculous statement. However, who's going to provide the birth control to low-income individuals who will not stay abstinent? How on earth does one expect an organization to enforce abstinence policies? What happens in the case of an accident when someone who "can't afford a child" becomes pregnant? Accidents happen, and this one in particular is very controversial.

As someone versed in many facets of the child welfare systems, I can assure you all that simply taking children away from a family does not solve the problem. The foster and child welfare system is overcrowded to say the least, with repeat occurrences of children sleeping in caseworkers' offices and in public facilities because the system is lacking in people willing or equipped to foster such a large amount of children. How many social systems are you willing to expand on or to fix in order to eliminate the few that you believe are unnecessary and a waste of your tax dollars?