blissy-leaves:

getoutofthewelfaretag:

thegodlessatheist:

Or a playstation or a flat screen TV or a newer car, etc and etc. I know people that work under the table for half their pay and get paid on the books for the rest and collect welfare. I know of drug dealers that collect for tax purposes even though they pull in thousands of untaxed money each month dealing. Tell me how I am not supposed to be upset with these people like I am with greedy corporate cronies? I’m not heartless. These people are selfish and unethical.

Except not everyone who has nice things is automatically cheating the system. People are given things as gifts. People buy things and THEN qualify for assistance. People save up for nice things.

You can’t assume what someone’s situation is just by what they own.

We were eating only donated Panera bread, rice, and turnips. My father was sneaking to the various blood banks in town to sell his plasma at twice the rate they allow. My mother was dying due to not having her medicine, which cost well over $1,200 a month after insurance.

My autistic baby brother wanted to do something nice for me.

He worked for months making custom art pieces to sell. He worked up courage despite crippling social anxiety and speech problems to ask the neighbors if he could do chores for them to earn more money - raking the yard, helping clean their house, walking their dogs.

For nine months he carefully hoarded his money in a jar in his bedroom. He counted it every single night and compared it to the cost of what he wanted to get for me for Christmas.

Finally he had enough. He bought me a DS Lite and a pokemon game.

He was so happy.

Until one of our neighbors, a highly conservative jackass, saw me with it outside a couple weeks later. My brother was with me.

The neighbor stormed up and became screaming at us, a pair of teenagers, over how we could be so selfish to spend money on “electronic shit” when we were a family on food stamps. Spittle flying from his lips, cuss words every other second, rage radiating off of him so violently that our father came running out of the house - at a limp, since his spine is broken, which causes him horrific daily pain beyond what I can imagine - to protect us.

My brother was never the same again. There is no happy ending here. That episode in his life changed him permanently and for the past seven years he has almost never left his room and never gone to a friend’s house. He is terrified of the neighbors and believes he is a bad person.

Because of fucking people like you OP.

Because of fuckers who believe that they know what life is like for everyone and have a right to judge.

So fuck you OP. If you know drug dealers, report them, go on and put your ass on the line then. But for fuck’s sake don’t you dare thing you understand what goes on in the life of the people who live in never-ending, grinding poverty. Because you have *no fucking clue* what goes on in the detailed lives of others.

You want to talk selfish? Look in the fucking mirror.