On Personal Responsibility

A quick after work grocery store run found me in line behind a quartet of young ladies in matching "Aquinas Volleyball" sweats, the expensive kind with embroidered numbers on the hood. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have thought much of this, but I noticed that the girl nearest to me was palming a Bridge Card, the State of Michigan's colloquial name for its EBT cards.

Far be it from me to condemn the use of EBT among students out of hand. Times are tough. When I worked at the Mott Community College bookstore in Flint a couple years back, nearly every student I worked with had kids and another job. If any of them had told me they were on food aid, I would have neither been surprised nor bothered in the least. However, Aquinas is not a cheap school. Tuition and fees for a residential student (which as varsity volleyball players these girls almost-certainly are) may be estimated, according to no less an authority than the school's website, at around $30,000 per year. It seems highly unlikely that these young ladies, who it must be noted were buying Sprite, Kit-Kats and Lunchables(!), would go hungry without their Bridge Cards. Indeed, the nature of undergraduate life at a residential college essentially precludes it. Room and board and so on.

No, it's pretty certain that these girls are representative of a trend that is well-known among college students and grocery store employees but vigorously-denied by the State of Michigan: college students who are willing to fudge the merest bit of paperwork scamming the system to the tune of up to $200 a month in food aid. I first became aware of this some time ago when I read an article in the Grand Valley student newspaper written in the faux-serious, semi-self righteous, martyrish tone characteristic of journalism students looking to bone up their pundit chops. Times is hard, the article went, and it's available, why not take advantage of it? Why, it'll free up some of your hard-earned money to buy books and pencils and blinker fluid for the 1999 Civic that your stupid parents sent you to college with instead of the Acura that your stupid dad was going to sell anyway and so on... But should you? Is it ethical?

Sure, why not?

Anyway.

I know all the counterarguments I'm open to. I'm making lots of assumptions about the volleyball players, and that's true. Obviously I have no idea of their finances. It is entirely possible that they're all scraping by on scholarships and Pell Grants and student loans and I'm just an asshole. I rather doubt it, though. I went to Albion College, which is more expensive than Aquinas but in the same ballpark cost-wise, and I didn't know one student who was really poor. I might have been the closest. That doesn't mean there weren't some, I wouldn't assert that just because I never saw one they didn't exist, but if they were around they were exceedingly-rare. Any anyway, the nature of full-time residential undergrad sort of excludes the demographic that really needs food aid. Speaking in broad generalities, if a family has the luxury of sending a kid off for four years of residential post-secondary schooling, even at a modestly-priced institution like Grand Valley, they're getting by. They may not be rich, they may not even be necessarily comfortable, but they're not destitute.

I should point out that I wouldn't change a thing about the EBT program. If trying to weed out some of the fraud prevented one person who needed it from getting it, it's not worth it. I'd rather err on the side of the angels, if you will.

We hear the right wing talk all the time about "personal responsibility." Eat that bag of Cheetos, don't expect healthcare, swipe that credit card one too many times, don't expect to be able to declare bankruptcy. All too often, the people who find themselves on the wrong end of "personal responsibility" are the poor ones. The ones who, forget being born on third base, were born with a nothing-and-two count and Bob Gibson on the mound. It's such a goddamn convenient way to marginalize the people who are easiest to marginalize anyway.

I'll tell you what personal responsibility is. Personal responsibility is not getting something you don't need for free even though you can. Personal responsibility is holding up your end of the social contract. It doesn't bother me that idiot college kids who don't know better spend their parent's tax money on Lunchables while we waste untold billions more on aircraft carriers and Predator drones and backscatter x-ray machines and a war on drugs that we lost long ago. It bothers me that their parents, the doctors and lawyers and Executive Vice Presidents of Sales and Marketing, let it happen and then vote for the Tea Party and damn the bloodsuckers who should work, by God, for the wages they're worth and if they get sick and can't get the treatment they need, well, that's tragic but it's the way of the world. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no guarantee of equal results," and all that.

Tragic. Really just frightfully sad. You know, I said to my man Jeeves just the other day as we drove past some wretched clinic of some sort, if these people would just take more pride in their appearance perhaps they could come up in the world a bit! Do they really think they can get a job looking like that?!

Honestly!

Anyway Margo, it's been delightful, must be off! Must be off! Ashleigh's volleyball team has a game tonight! Shouldn't want to miss it! I've told her that if she wins I'll take to the Chop House for a steak tonight! She does so love the fillet there!