INTENSEINTENTS @willyloman138-blog - Tumblr Blog

This will never not be funny…

“We live in an extraordinary era in which there is no tradition on which we can base our identity, no frame of meaningful universe which might enable us to lead a life beyond hedonist reproduction”

— http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1048558407630901249

bob-belcher

theartofmany

Artist: Abrar Khan Title: Saiko “Some photobash for fun” Cool stuff…

alwaysbewoke

Story

#sadboi #tattoo #rocknroll

think-progress

Members of Congress are living off food stamps for a week to protest Republican cuts. It’s a challenge for them, but GOP cuts would hurt millions of everyday Americans.

wagrobanite

Why does this not have more publicity. This needs it!

apolymathpainintheass

I want a reality tv show where politicians have to live in poverty for a month. They have to live in Government housing, shop with food stamps, and get only a limited amount of money for clothes. Because here, they still have all their trappings, lilke nice cars and thousand dollar suits. I want them in Walmart jeans trying to determine if they can afford a carton of milk.

fuck-me-barnes

Give them a full calendar year. I want to see them confident in January, and sometime around June choking back tears at the Safeway because they are tired, so tired, of eating 25 cent cup noodles, eyeing other peoples’ full grocery carts with a dull bewilderment. Let me see them despair because they have a persistent nagging cough that won’t go away and might be turning into pneumonia but the minute clinic is $60, which might as well be as six million dollars, either way they ain’t got it to spare - and that doesn’t count the cost of prescriptions. Let me hear them tell people about the muscle cramps they get at night due to eating non-nutritious garbage for months, the weakness from persistent hunger. Let them know the shame and frustration of only owning one pair of cheap polyester pants for work and one pair of thrift-store jeans, and both persistently have ripped crotches and seams coming undone, no matter how many times they get sewn back up. Let the women know the particular sort of despair that comes once a month when you can’t afford even the cheapest pads or tampons. Let them understand the frustration of being charged a $35 fee for a $2 overdraft. Let them watch as the bank holds charges from different days in “pending” till they all come through on the same day, and the bank charges them four times for a single overdraft because “the charges all cleared at the same time”. I want them to know the particular pain of having to decide between food for the week, or transportation costs to and from work. You can’t have both. Choose wisely. You do not truly understand poverty until you’ve lived it and a month isn’t enough to encompass it. Not even close.

amey-winehouse

^^^

thecringeandwincefactory-deacti

Bless.

silentmania-deactivated20191108

Food stamps don’t come in the form of cash. I call bullshit.

thecringeandwincefactory-deacti

It would be fraud for them to actually be given “food stamps,” so my guess is they’re given a food stamps budget and restrictions on what they can buy so they can experience what having to live off EBT/SNAP is like. It’s a gloss for the story.

Imo, it’s fucking amazing and scary the things people who are far away from poverty don’t know about the rest of us, particularly our elected officials, but even just upper caste Americans as well. An anecdote: I was a guest curator at a very stuffy private college in New England with a very nice art collection a few years back. The director invited me to her house one evening to have some food and chat; her husband came home early from work and she immediately stiffened up. As soon as he opened his mouth, I sort of understood why - I forget what the hell we had been talking about (maybe just general politics? This was while Obama was still president), but he started going off on welfare fraud.

The dude was wearing an oxford shirt tucked into khakis with dock shoes on his feet, I shit you not. He was like a walking New England stereotype. I would not be surprised if he could trace an ancestor to the Mayflower, and I doubt he’s ever wanted for anything in his life, tbh.

Anyway, I asked him point blank if he’d ever been on welfare, or knew anyone who’d ever been on welfare. He demurred he didn’t, so I said, “Well, now you do.” I told him how, last time I was on welfare, you essentially couldn’t abuse the system - you either got WIC checks that said exactly what you could buy and how much, or you got an EBT debit card that only allowed you purchase of certain things, diapers not being one of them.

He was fucking shocked, which made me angry. He was so proud and so sure of himself that I sort of doubt I made any real, permanent headway getting through to him, just like I sort of doubt the people in this story will change the way they think about being poor in the United States simply because - they’re doing this once. They don’t have to experience what endemic or generational poverty is like. But maybe this experience will give them the slightest bit of pause when a basic security net for the poor is on the chopping block again and they have the power to stop it.