Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Welfare Shock On a visit to Southern California a few weeks ago, I spent a morning with a 38-year-old electrical engineer--call him Frank Whites--who had been laid off...
...For all the best efforts of a local Left-wing group which put Frank on its mailing list and invited him to speak on the subject of unemployment under capitalism, no radical sentiments have been aroused...
...Dorothy has learned some of the difficulties of bringing up three young children on a welfare budget --"a school outfit for the oldest, one pair of pajamas each, one play outfit each, one pair of tennis shoes...
...to eat more macaroni and cheese than one might care for...
...to stop buying clothes and going to the movies...
...to have to let one's bills slide until the dunning letters become seriously threatening --"the utilities don't fool around, they'll cut off the electricity...
...In November, having gone through his unemployment insurance, his vacation pay, and his modest savings, and having borrowed the maximum on his life insurance policy, he applied for welfare...
...She believes there ought to be a cut-off point: After the birth of more than one illegitimate child, the mother would be sterilized...
...They feel most uncomfortable on welfare: "The whole damned system is not designed for us...
...You hate to go on it...
...to fear for the day when the '64 station wagon (130,000 miles) will break down--"you have to have a car out here...
...She is somewhat anxious about her daughters falling behind: "These days most children already know how to read and add when they start school...
...Adversity generally breeds discontent--but it does not channel it...
...Perhaps elsewhere affection for the poor abounds in the world of the formerly well-off, and perhaps other workers displaced from the aerospace industry are more worried about the military-industrial complex and the environmental perils of the sst than they are about their own jobs...
...It's a high-pay, high-risk industry...
...The state just ought to tell them, 'No, you're not going to get a penny...
...Frank's predicament is not uncommon today in distressed centers of the aerospace industry, from Orange County to Long Island...
...So stop it!' Paddle their fannies...
...They see their situation as a temporary one, an accident which must in the nature of things be corrected...
...to accept an occasional loan from a relative with no prospect of being able to repay it...
...We've met our obligations...
...On the long lines at the medical center, they look at you like you just don't belong there...
...It is easier to call up sympathy for the poor when one's own circumstances do not tax one's resources of sympathy...
...It's happened everywhere...
...But this century's history does not lack examples of a hurt, confused, angry middle class moving not to the Left along with a hurt, confused, angry lower class, but to the distant Right...
...That is accomplished by other influences, the kind of influences that are making themselves felt on the Whites...
...The Divided Front So misfortune in the White household has not bred solidarity with the underprivileged, or compassion for the underclass...
...We're not being destroyed by this," affirms Dorothy...
...They do, after all, live in a congressional district that has sent Barry Goldwater's son to Washington...
...their welfare benefits have been pegged at $239 a month, so Frank is permitted to earn the remaining $151 and continue to draw his welfare allotment...
...The change in the family fortunes is marked by the place on the living-room wall where an ongoing paint job was cut off last year, along with the Apollo contract...
...Instead Frank and Dorothy are beginning to feel a kind of bitterness...
...Frank and Dorothy are not blaming the System for their troubles...
...Having worked hard and paid their way all their lives without asking for a great deal as things go in America, they resent being lumped with people who have made careers of living off welfare...
...His years of steady employment had given him a breathing space of just seven months...
...Nothing she has seen at the medical center has forced her to change her image of welfare clients...
...Thus, whether he counts cans for 15 hours a week or for 35 hours, he still ends up with a total of $390 at the end of the month...
...We have just a little bit too much...
...One might assume that such difficulties would turn lukewarm Republicans like Frank and Dorothy away from the party in power...
...It pays $2.50 an hour...
...And she goes on to compare their own lifelong willingness to work--Frank was an orphan who got his bs at the University of Texas on the GI Bill--and their determination to keep their family together no matter what, with those she calls irresponsible, the people who seem content to live indefinitely on handouts and whose loudest complaint is that the handouts aren't big enough...
...They don't know exactly who or what to blame, outside of bad luck, but they want it clearly understood that they do not belong on welfare...
...I feel guilty about taking it...
...There's no incentive to go out," he complains...
...Since November, he has been supporting his wife and three young daughters with a combination of welfare payments and odd jobs...
...The New Math The Whites...
...He had been laid off from jobs before, but "then, when one company was coming down, another was coming up...
...They're telling you, you can't earn," says Dorothy, and adds, not without a touch of pride, "Frank isn't the sort of person to sit idle...
...Frank speaks of himself and his fellow engineers as "highly skilled, highly trained men"--not, emphatically, your run-of-the-mill welfare specimen...
...He has sent out about 100 resumes in the last year, and keeps the regretful refusals in a looseleaf book along with other mementos...
...They delve into your personal affairs, tell you what to do...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Welfare Shock On a visit to Southern California a few weeks ago, I spent a morning with a 38-year-old electrical engineer--call him Frank Whites--who had been laid off from his $14,000-a-year job with North American Aircraft in April 1970, when the firm completed its work on the Apollo project...
...Frank takes as many hours of work as he can get and does odd jobs for neighbors in his spare time, but the Whites know that not every welfare client exerts himself for no profit...
...We're too well dressed, I guess...
...The Whites know their blessings -- a cozy home in a quiet, all white suburb, a decent school, hopes for a new job despite the gloomy smog that has closed in on the aerospace business...
...caseworker has routinely ordained that the family requires $390 a month to get along...
...Perhaps the feelings of Frank and Dorothy White are not typical...
...Dorothy is very much aware of the contrast between her family and the families she thinks of as welfare cases: "We're just a little bit too well off...
...and not to be able to repair the damage done to one's home by a recent earthquake, much less clean the carpet or reupholster the furniture...
...they're irresponsible...
...At present, he has a part-time job, taking inventory in supermarkets...
...Perhaps...
...there is only so much of that good thing to go around...
...But there is another dimension to their situation...
...It destroys individual initiative...
...Obviously, it is most disagreeable to have to be concerned over losing one's house--Frank has so far managed to cover the mortgage payments, but doesn't know how he's going to meet his real estate taxes when they fall due...
...She has been diagnosed as "a typical aphasiac...
...They are part of the System, not dropouts or flunkouts, and if it comes to a division, they will not, if they can help it, be found in the ranks of the dispossessed...
...Specially worrisome to Frank and Dorothy White is their inability to pay for needed therapy for their five-year-old daughter, who suffers from speech and perception problems...
...It doesn't pay enough to maintain the standard of living we had before...
...Only this time they're all down...
...Although he seems to have mastered the knack of not looking too far into the future, Frank does toy with a last-resort notion of moving to Tasmania if the smog doesn't lift...
...For every additional dollar that he earns, however, he loses a dollar of aid...
...they wear them out so quickly"--but she has read of women who exist on Aid to Dependent Children payments . . . and yet continue to have babies...
...The child psychologist who has been seeing her has kindly cut his fee a bit and is letting the bill ride--It's up to about $500"--but the child is now able to get only one hour a week of therapy instead of the desirable two hours...
...She doesn't understand that mode of life...
...Dorothy, though not very political (she couldn't recall the name of her congressman), admits to an admiration for Governor Ronald Reagan...
...Moreover, she needs special preparation if she is to fit into first grade next fall, but the $300-a-month rate for private nursery school is far beyond the family's means...
...We don't have that attitude of collecting without working...
...In their small way, they represent an American success story...
...Indeed, Frank is convinced that the welfare rolls are filled with cheaters, and he suspects that he is now suffering because the state coffers have been plundered by others, people less diligent and fastidious than himself...
...So Dorothy gives part of each day to tutoring her five-year-old and feels guilty about neglecting her three-year-old...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 9
