A Hand Up Not a Hand Out

One of the things I’m glad about is that the US government reformed the Welfare system during the Clinton Administration. I think that these programs should be a hand up and not a hand out.

One of the things I once hears an African American women say was, “Maybe if we feed and clothe the minorities, they’ll love us. Sadly, I must contend that the outcome was not such in many years.

Years ago, I had a paper route and one of the families on my route was a welfare mother whose husband was an alcoholic. She also had a son who I got into a fight with. They owed me three weeks of money for the paper and when I attempted to collect, instead of getting the money I was owed I got a lecture about how, “I want to see the day, when all children will respect their elders.” I dumped her family from the paper routes.

Many people who were raised on welfare as welfare babies, also did not have job skills and worse than that many of them were bullies. I know about it because I grew up in an integrated neighbor hood where we had quite a few minority children and some of these classmates of mine were the worst people. Some of them were sexual degenerates as well as being bullies.

Workfare has simply failed most of the people who were on it and there are certain reasons for that. One reason is that companies won’t hire an adult who has no work experience. I had a similar problem myself years ago.

When I got my Masters degree, I went looking for work but I had a trouble finding it. My father kept telling me to go to job agencies and so-called “headhunting firms”, but I found out they won’t work with you right out of college and even if you have an advanced degree especially with no suitable work experience.

I was lucky to find work at all. And the truth is that I’ve found my Master’s degree to be unmarketable recently. I was only able to find work after I went to a technical school that trained me in computer programming.

Now I’m sure the Master’s helped my nail down my first big job and I’m sure the training was necessary and aided me during my employ but right now I simply needed to be retrained again. I took a course in freelance writing and that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this document.