GUEST BLOGGER: Pam Stack

Pam Stack is one of the "smart and sassy" hosts of the web-based interview show  Authors on the Air.  Check it out! And thanks, Pam for the guest blog.


Time for me to ‘fess up.  Come clean. Do confession.  I am one of Paul’s 30% or Mitt’s 47%.  Yes, it’s true.  I am one of those lapsed Americans who went to the guv-mint for, er….  a hand-out.  Here’s my story.  I’ve been working all of my life, since I was 15 in fact.  Parents raised me right. Got good grades throughout school.  But last year, I went with my hat in my hand and asked, nay, BEGGED, my guv-mint for a handout and was granted it.  That started my shame spiral toward the hell known as UNEMPLOYMENT.  I jumped through the required hoops and did the requisite dance and I was the recipient of $84.00 a week of entitlement money for a hellishly long 6 months.

I’m trying to look at this in a fair and conscientious way. After all, I’m not the only one on the dole here. I’ve researched this and found that I am in fine company with these other slackers.  I’ve identified some of them lest you think it’s just me who was a money-grabbing low life.  Here they are, in no particular order:

• Our infirm elderly.  Imagine working all your life, paying your fair share of taxes, buying American cars and other products produced in the good old USA, purchasing a home and sharing in the excitement of a mortgage-burning party with family and friends, only to find yourself so sick after retirement, that you must be confined to one of our nations finer establishments known as a NURSING HOME.  You old folks gave up your homes, your cars and all your worldly possessions and hand over your Social Security checks just to go on Medicaid so you can live with ‘round the clock nursing care?  How dare you ask the government for help.  You’ve been misled down that entitlement path.  If this is what the rest of us have to look forward to, well, this country is in sad shape.  And this is the result of our American Dream?
• Of course I cannot forget to mention those other slackers – our wounded warriors.  How dare these brave men and women go and fight in the Middle East or somewhere around the world in a war that WE started, only to come home with Traumatic Brain Injury, missing limbs and the horrors of killing so etched in their brains that normal functioning seems a lost cause.  And you dare ask your government to help you out with medical and psychological assistance, housing, a job or food?  Pull yourself up by those military bootstraps and kick it in gear, soldier.
• What about those who were born with physical, mental and emotional challenges?  You expect the hard-working tax-paying citizens of this country to give you a hand up?  Why?  You’re not society’s responsibility.  Your family should take care of you.  
• And of course – the bane of all that is good and right with this country. WOMEN.  And WOMEN WITH CHILDREN.  You ho’s and welfare moms. Shame on you.  Doesn’t matter that you have been the backbone of the working middle class and get paid less for the same job as your male counterparts do.  Doesn’t matter that you birthed them babies and their daddy ran off with another woman and he refuses to accept even the slightest financial responsibility (after all, he as a new family now).  Doesn’t matter that half of all women and their children who are homeless are such because of domestic violence.  Women, you can’t take care of yourselves enough to figure out that your produce “chemicals”, kind of like the South’s version of “the vapors” to ward off pregnancy.  Like Eve tempted Adam with her apple, society has gone to hell in a handbasket because you can’t pull yourself by your bra straps and be a contributing member of this American society.

So, you see, I’m in fine company with my hand-out.  I paid my taxes on that $84.00 a week that I received for six months.   So Mitt and Paul must have seen into my dark heart and realized that, yes, I no longer an interested in the “American Dream”.  Thank the lord for our Republic's public servants.  Yeh.