Welfare has become a dysfunctional multi-generation cycle in our country. Women and in many cases girls have children, get on welfare and apply for public housing. This was done by their mother and their mother’s mother. Why? Because this is how they grew up. To most of us, we want to do better in life. Make money, have a decent home, raise happy healthy children that want to do well. These simple values that most of us share are foreign to the multigenerational welfare family. We aspire to do well in life and with a lot of work; our children will do even better. These ideas are not shared. These values are not passed down. Complacency and apathy are the norm. They have never been taught something better is out there and it is attainable by education, hard work and treating others decently. It is sad but it is true.
you highlight something i have discussed numerous times here...generational poverty.
and some stupid people can not make the correllation between america's racist past and the disproportionate amount of minorities on aid. it is a culture of poverty.
how does one spur an extremely poor person who is comfortable with poverty to be wealthy?
how do you make another person value money as much as other people do?
i do not think you can. i have just as much experience as you jeff - maybe even more - with various people on welfare, and put myself in trenches to try to combat it daily...and i rarely find victory.
when your world is consumed solely with surviving - dreaming about "what you want to be when you grow up" can seem un-reachable at times.
it doesnt stop me from trying to reach them daily - but...i do not know how to do that myself.
i have watched relatives and those close to me wreck their families and get consumed by the endless pursuit of money - and i challenge the notion that "success" is based upon how much money one has obtained in their life...so i empathize with the extremely poor to a certain extent.
according to Buddhism - and a general conensus among all the people i have ever known, the middle path is the best way.
rather than focus efforts on taking what little the extreme poor have - or taking from the extremely rich - we should focus on making america the land of the middle-class.