I grew up below the dirt poor, like oodles and noodles were a treat poor, with no adult supervision for a good portion of my childhood. My mom was on basically every government program that existed, that didn’t mean I got anything out of it. The only reason I survived was by people looking the other way as I fed myself.
As I got older I had no life skills whatsoever and couldn’t hold down a job, friends, or any sort of meaningful relationship. So again, dirt poor, a little better off than I was before because there were a few ways to make money. But still I only ever got food at a store, and probably would have starved if too many people said something, or had to do even worse stuff than I was to feed myself.
Hell even when I got myself together a bit and held down a shitty job for a while I still couldn’t afford to feed myself after the bills hit, it was even worse when I started making just enough to get kicked off state insurance and stamps.
There are a lot of people out here just trying to survive, they shouldn’t have to steal to eat but they do and in my eyes that’s a human right.
Side note: food stamps are a fucking joke. What they’re giving to a family of 4 wouldn’t feed a single person, from my experience at least.
I had to go to urgent care the other day and the only way to check in was to scan a QR code and fill out a god awful, half broken form on a random third party website. There were no error messages. The site would timeout if you spent too long on one page, so you’d have to start over. The amount of people who had all sorts of issues is nuts.
This was “an upgrade”