In Great Britain, the judges wear these powdered wigs. Here, they tend to wear black robes. What they all should wear — what everyone should wear — before being allowed to judge, is a pair of moccasins.
Someone else’s moccasins.
There have been two instances recently where I’ve seen people passing judgment who had no clue. They looked down from their lofty perches, vomited up the same old crap they’d heard vomited up by others who also had no clue, and felt as though they were the better people for doing it.
A friend of mine was getting out of her car to go into a store one day. Someone looked at her, looked at her car, and said — just loudly enough to be overheard — “Must be nice having a handicapped sticker when you don’t need one.”
Not an hour later, at the grocery store, a similar thing happened. This time, the woman who said something to my friend was also in a handicapped-stickered car. She was the handicapped one. Her husband — her healthy and un-handicapped husband — parked in the handicapped lot and hopped out to go get groceries.
This time, My friend, still stinging from the earlier incident, didn’t even park in a blue lot, but the other woman took one look at her sticker, shook her finger in my friend’s face and said “Shame! Shame!”
Oh, there was something to be ashamed of, but it wasn’t anything my friend did. It was the other women, who assumed because my friend did not have a cane or walker, she wasn’t truly handicapped.
What she has is a rare condition that causes her skin to lister severey under the slightest pressure. Just the short walk from the car to the door can raise oozing welts on her feet, on her waist — anywhere anything can rub against her skin.
She also has fibromyalgia and a degenerative bone disease and has several small, broken bones in her feet that will never heal. She’s been recently diagnosed with a potentially fatal liver disease.
But because she wasn’t in a wheelchair, she’s supposed to be ashamed of that blue sticker?
No, Those who judged without the facts should be ashamed.
A few days after she told me about this, I saw an apparently healthy couple park in a handicapped lot and get out to go into a store. I almost said something — I have a nephew in a wheelchair and I get ferocious about people who park there without reason — but I remembered her story. For all I knew, they had as many things wrong with them as my friend does. Either way, the only person who had the right to judge whether or not they got that blue sticker was the agency that assigned it. It wasn’t my place or my right to do so — especially since I didn’t have any of the facts, much less all of them.
Another incident hit closer to home. Someone posted a snotty comment about the woman in front of her buying food with food stamps, then getting into her nice car with her designer clothes and driving off. The poeple who came on and added their own pithy and prurient judgments had at least two things in common. One, they assumed that everyone who used food stamps abused food stamps. 2: They have never had to be on food stamps themselves.
I’m about to be, and I am mortified. Knowing that I have failed my family so badly, that I cannot provide for them, is just killing me, but pride has to be expendable when there is no food in the house. If it had not been for the kindness of friends, families and absolute strangers, we would have had little or no meat this winter.
It is humiliating enough, knowing that I’ve failed, but knowing that I’m being judged as I pick up that much-needed food for my family is terrifying. My emotional health is shaky at best — I dread what will happen the first time I have to use the card.
Here are some real facts for those who were so quick to judge. Food stamps cannot be used to purchase tobacco or alcohol. In fact, it can’t be used for anything but food that has to be prepared at home. In other words, I can’t take it to Red Lobster, but I can use it to buy hamburger for a meatloaf I make myself. I can’t use it to buy cleaning supplies or toilet paper. I don’t get cash back to buy alcohol and cigarettes.
True,I could use it to buy premium food items then sell them and use that money for booze and smokes, but I won’t. Most people won’t. We need the food too much.
Am I taking a handout? Yes. A handout I’ve paid for in part through the taxes I’ve pad in my 3+ decades as a wage earner.
What I haven’t paid for in taxes, I will be paying for in pain and indignity as you pass judgment behind me. I won’t be leaving in designer clothes — I get mine at Goodwill. I won’t be driving off in a luxury car — our 10-year-old van has 210,000 miles and no handles on the back doors. But I will be leaving in shame.
Keep in mind, about that other woman — you don’t know when those clothes ere bought, or the car. All it takes is one layoff and one major illness, and you, too, could be suffering the humiliation of getting your food with food stamps. I know.
Try those moccasins on for size.
marymothermayhem 