The governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, is going for the 21-dollar-holler.

The man has vowed to live for one week on the average weekly allowance of food stamps for a single person in his state.

This is an example of what politicians should do.

Twenty-one dollars won’t get most families past the meat aisle but Kulongoski has vowed to try it out. He’s doing it to raise awareness on the difficulty of feeding a family on such a puny budget.

Not only will this politician know first-hand how difficult it is for a family on budget to feed itself in this country, but he is setting a valuable example for other politicians. Maybe Bush could be next and try to live on a limited energy-budget for a while during one of our winters.

With any luck, Kulongoski will experience first-hand the anxiety of a minimal-wage worker budgeting their cart. Maybe he’ll witness the negotiation between a parent and a toddler over an expensive snack ending with the dreaded verdict, “we can’t afford it.”
I used to find myself really torn on the issue of poverty in America. The O’Reilly youth within me cried, No mercy, God helps those who help themselves, there’s no better country in the world to do well in, etc.

But as I’m getting older and reading a little more on this sort of thing, I’m becoming more aware that sometimes people are just poor. That the American society is set up to have poverty by design. That sometimes, there’s nothing the poor in this country did to deserve their spot. And most importantly, it has nothing to do with them being lazy.

But that’s not the American ideology. Instead, we subject our poor to humiliation — to fumbling with an inadequate amount of food stamps at the check out aisle. The intent, I believe, is to keep them just uncomfortable enough so they will work harder to earn the comforts of middle-class, which is precisely the kind of logic that makes me want to stick my tongue out and blow.

A year ago, I was volunteering with a family of Somali refugees. Nothing will knock you off your ideological high horse faster than spending time with a family of four that can’t afford bananas.

Every year, the state department absorbs a certain amount of refugee families from various places and resettles them across the country. For Somalia, the intent, I guess, is to relieve the swelling and exhausted camps outside of Mombassa that went up around the time Black Hawk went down.

As a college kid, I had no real level of expertise to help assimilate a young family into American society. But I had a car and some free time and a fluency of English so I’d just show up to see what needed to be done that day.

A lot of my time was spent navigating the social programs of our society. I’d been lucky enough as kid to never see a food stamp or learn what the WIC program was. I learned real quick.

The mother of the two infants spoke virtually no English. My job was partial translator, partial tutor, partial baby-drool collector. I’d spend time shuffling through utility bills and calling the agencies to make sure we received that months worth of vouchers.

“My Somalis” as I called them, relied on those coupons every month for formula, meat, milk and cheese. Those coupons dictated what that family ate. Fresh vegetables, because not covered by the WIC program in our state, were the last things added to the cart.

So every week, we’d load up go to store, doing that baby-seat hell thing involving crumbs, straps and bribes. By the way, it takes an hour to load a ten-pound baby in a car. I learned that too.

We’d spend two hours at the store, keeping those two babies amused, buying the family’s weekly groceries. We’d bust out a calculator and meticulously choose our items. With a full cart and two now-crabby infants, we’d then wait in line at the cashier only to be told by some bonehead, fake-nailed employee with a formidable derriere that there was some clerical error with the coupons, something with the signatures or there was a crease in the wrong place. The mama Somali, embarrassed at the growing checkout line, would lower her head in shame, fumbling through her purse for the right slip of paper as babies screamed on.

In any case, I’ve never been set off so quickly with such frequency and force as I did in Food Lion that year.

Looking back, it was unbelievably time-consuming to make sure that family had adequate food every month. Since there was virtually no income, one parent was at home caring for the two babies and the other was working at a local hotel for a low hourly wage, they could not pull themselves up. They did everything “right” in terms of working and saving their money. But still, formula and food are expensive. They relied solely on those coupons. Twenty-one dollars was a big deal to this young family.

It’s hard to give a crap about every little social issue and I realize this, especially at our age. And I have no time for liberal guilt either. But food stamps are a ridiculous fiasco in this country. There are no excuses for the way we treat our poor. To expect a person to live on a $21 per week food budget is outrageous.

Nothing will open your eyes faster about social services until two hours of your day are spent on the phone tracking two missing milk vouchers. So when I see men like that governor, I am overwhelmed and impressed by how he is actively opening his mind about this taboo topic — the poor in America — and humbly chowing down on Ramen noodles and not-so-organic bananas this week. Way to go, Oregon.

–Originally published in the University of Idaho Argonaut, 27 April 2007