This Spiritual Illness Has to be Contested

Not giving is taking. If you don’t feed me, you starve me. My stomach is your duty, and you have to fill it.

This language is everywhere, right now, and it frequently uses a variation on the same phrase: “stripped away.”

Statement from the Idaho Democratic Party a few days ago, discussing the expected pause in SNAP payments during the government shutdown: “Idaho’s Republican leaders are complicit. Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson, Jim Risch, and Mike Crapo have all refused to lift a finger as food benefits are stripped away from Idaho families.” It’s like somebody is breaking into cellars and carrying away the ancestral food benefits that families raised in the fields over the generations. “Lord, mama, I was saving great-great-grandma’s EBT card for a rainy day.”

That “stripped away” has been a thing for a while, in a conscious bit of rhetorical programming. See, for example, the much-discussed story, this week, about a leftist political candidate in Montana leaving a message for Senator Tim Sheehy, back in July, saying that she hoped he would get cancer and die after his vote to impose work requirements for Medicaid eligibility: “Hi, this is Haley McKnight. I’m a constituent in Helena Montana, and I just wanted to let you know that you are the most insufferable kind of coward and thief. You just stripped away health care for 17 million Americans.”

People are being taught to speak like that, by media and politicians. They’re being taught the formulation “stripped away,” and are swallowing whole all of the unexamined premises that march in behind it: Imposing work requirements on participants in a government insurance program is stealing. Tim Sheehy is a thief. He “stripped away” healthcare. Everyone naturally possesses unlimited government benefits, which cannot ever be denied or limited or made conditional. This is the correct and inevitable way to live: When the fridge is empty, the government buys you more groceries. That’s how food reaches your kitchen.

Recent news stories have assumed this premise of ownership over and over again. The government is taking away benefits, cruelly removing a thing that cannot ever be properly limited in any way. Watch at least the first 45 seconds of this:

Interviewee, speaking about her SNAP benefits: “I have depended on those benefits since the 1990s, and it is detrimental to my life if I don’t get them.” Decades on recurring government food aid, as a presumptive must-have. Entire adult lives in which people never feed themselves, and expect that they’ll never feed themselves. I’m in serious trouble, ‘cause the government ain’t gave me no food this month. Screenshot, with captions:

If you kept watching that news story past 45 seconds, you got to New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan saying, “We are going to choose feeding families over politics in New Mexico.” Where does food come from? It comes from government. If government doesn’t give you food, you starve. The widespread acceptance of that premise is a danger.

William Tecumseh Sherman wasted a bunch of energy with his March to the Sea, destroying Southern farms and homes. All he had to do was not give crops to the South, and Southerners would have been totally destroyed, because not giving is taking. If you don’t give people stuff, you’re a thief. The absence of free things is ruin. “Our crops are destroyed, because Sherman didn’t grow them for us.”

The point of the wise counsel that “if any would not work, neither should he eat” is that a life of passive taking is debilitating and an assault on human dignity. “I have depended on those benefits since the 1990s, and it is detrimental to my life if I don’t get them.” No, it’s detrimental to your life that you have gotten them. Thirty-plus years of SNAP benefits is a sustained cultural attack, a demoralizing act of aggression. Decades of SNAP benefits is something dark that has been done to you, a degradation of your humanity. A sponge isn’t a person.

Endorsed:

It’s fun to be a person. There’s pleasure in making something, getting stuff, doing stuff. There’s satisfaction in it. “Look at what we grew,” a farmer says, watching his crop being trucked away.

I don’t hear many Republicans making this argument. I hear Democrats saying that food is being “stripped away,” and Republicans mostly saying that Democrats are at fault for voting against the continuing resolution. I don’t hear a serious and sustained insistence that we face a crisis of passive and demoralized dependency.

USDA: “In FY 2024, SNAP served an average of 41.7 million participants per month. Federal SNAP spending totaled $99.8 billion and benefits averaged $187.20 per participant per month.”

Also: “Twenty-one percent of SNAP households in FY 2023 consisted exclusively of one or more non-elderly adults without a disability and without children…Half of all SNAP households included an individual who was elderly or had a disability.” So half didn’t.

A lot of able-bodied, non-elderly adults without children are being fed by the government, and believe that they must be fed by the government. That choice has to be contested, and the costs of learned helplessness have to be faced. We’re not harming people by limiting food aid, with the exception of people who are too old or too disabled to work (which leads to other discussions about where food assistance should come from, but that’s not what I’m writing about here). Rather, we’re harming people by not limiting food aid more carefully, and by teaching an enormous part of the population the premise that they’ll starve if the government doesn’t feed them. What a remarkably dark thing to believe, a collapse into a crippled passivity. It’s like lobotomizing adults with a plastic card, rendering them as helpless as if they’d lost cognition to a spike through the head.

“I have depended on those benefits since the 1990s, and it is detrimental to my life if I don’t get them.”

I’m sorry this has been done to you.