As the debate heats up about welfare, it is incumbent upon Americans to learn the real root causes of the welfare state. The partisan debate taking place in Congress is out of touch, as usual, with the reality of welfare. As is typical of the openly partisan press, the entire issue of welfare is clouded by the institutional interests of the two major parties, which are more concerned with undermining each other than they are with the business of government.

When Americans think about the welfare issue, they imagine fat and lazy black people who drive Cadillacs to collect their welfare checks for fictitious "recipients." We hear about worse-case scenarios that seem to justify the mean treatment welfare recipients are exposed to at the hands of a callous and heavy-handed bureaucracy. What we never hear about are the midnight visits by investigators, or the administrative tricks that are employed to put pressure on the welfare recipients, who live under the equivalent of a reign of fear. When welfare mothers are "interviewed" by the media, it is under carefully controlled guidelines that guarantee that the welfare bureaucracy will always be portrayed in the best possible light. The fact that American families have actually been split up by a bureaucracy pursuing statistics that justify its next budget, is openly ignored by a media that refuses to investigate the welfare system with any genuine depth.

We know that people in prison, at the very minimum, suffer a loss of their civil rights after having been convicted of crimes; Americans on welfare, however, have not been convicted of any crime, but they lose their civil rights too, and the media never addresses this glaring contradiction. Instead they portray welfare recipients in a sleazy light, and the bureaucracy as a shining knight come to rescue the helpless, and gullible Americans buy it. The truth is that 300 years of state policies created a dependent underclass, before the state changed those policies abruptly without any concern for the consequences. The "consequences," it turns out, are a crime wave and a prison\police state designed to resist the injustices of history at all costs. The welfare establishment, far from being perpetuated for any altruistic purposes, is actually a cheap bid to buy off the anger and resentment of the underclass, which is defined by an ancestry of slavery and servitude.

The imagery employed by the schools and the media when they describe the Revolutionary Era is an imagery of heroism and patriotism, and above all, national unity. The Founding Fathers are depicted as kindly old gentlemen who "reluctantly" allowed themselves to be called to public service. There is a tendency to equate the Revolutionary Era with the Age of Miracles of the Bible, when angels walked and talked with men. In the same way that the Age of Miracles came to an end because God "decided" one day not to use prophets after a certain date, so too the rules were suspended during the Revolutionary era, and it was okay for that brief period to break the law, so long as the person you were murdering was loyal to the King.

The age of European colonialism is an epoch of conquest and violence that is played down by the descendants of the original settlers, who own lands globally in a system of private property that is alien to most of the traditional cultures of the world. There is a fundamental difference of mindset between aboriginal cultures and the urbanized European culture, which was untroubled by the creation of a fictitious social division that resulted in the enslavement of millions of human beings for thousands of years. There is no doubt that European culture has made vast and significant contributions to human civilization, so like all things in life, the European influence is a mixed bag. But the one unique contribution of European civilization that has been an anchor around the neck of every country that owes its origins to European colonialism, was the development of slavery as an economic fixture.

Slavery had its origins in conquests of war, but it didn't really exist as a stable institution until about the time that the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews. There were slaves of Egypt, however, who rose to positions of prominence, illustrating a different type of institution than the commoditized institution of the Greeks, and then the Romans. The Romans developed a complicated system of urban control that made it possible for a class of slaves to be maintained in perpetuity. It even defined slavery as a hereditary condition, forcing the children of slaves into slavery. When modern "scholars" wax on about the mothercities of "democracy," Athens or the Roman Republic, (especially when drawing comparisons between these ancient centers of civilization and the moribund American society), they neglect to remember that the slave market dominated the daily life of ancient people. And where there are slaves there is a garrison mentality that lives in complete terror of the possibility of slave revolts.

Modern scholarship says very little about the resources that went into cutting off the inclination of the enslaved human beings of Colonial America to escape servitude. It is easy to forget that in the era of legalized slavery, those people who were not slaves were inclined to accept the notion that a person could actually constitute "property," especially if the prospect of possessing such property enhanced one's prestige and status in the community. Thus it was not necessary to actually own a slave to be a defender of the institution of slavery. Under such circumstances it was not hard to convince a neighborhood of the wisdom of local slaveowners keeping their slaves busy, and illiterate. The fear of the slaves getting "ideas" in their heads led to a concerted effort to reduce the slave caste to dependence upon the slavemasters. This is part of the legacy that we continue to live with today, as the offspring of generations of slaves who were literally bred for strength, are equipped mentally with an education which virtually leaves them handicapped.

An eloquent example of how the American society handles the reality of its own past can be found in the career of Jimmy the Greek. Always an outspoken man, Jimmy the Greek was a famous odds-maker. His fame led to a job with one of the major television networks as a sportscaster, where he was trusted to speak to tens of millions of ordinary Americans about a subject that had long been used to distract average people from the borderline legal activities of the government: SPORTS. One day, however, Jimmy the Greek went too far. He casually stated to his audience of millions that the reason black people excel in sports in the 20th century was because during the era of slavery, they had been bred for strength. Now the unfortunate but historic truth is that after 1808, when the trade in slaves was nominally stopped, up to 1864, when chattel slavery was abolished in the United States, slavemasters did indeed "breed" human beings for slavery, using the same methods that had been successfully applied to animals. The only problem for Jimmy the Greek was that the institutions that dominate modern American society are in denial about the country's genuine slavery past, because it properly puts the Federal Government in a bad light. Jimmy the Greek was summarily fired, never to be heard from again.

The fact that America's prisons are primarily full of the descendants of slaves, and that the welfare rolls have a high percentage of slave descendants, is evidence that the Establishment knew that there was a price to be paid for the injustices that had been visited upon the slave caste. Rather than confront the "price" and pay it, the republic has built prisons, and created elaborate fictions to justify the suppression of the hopes and dreams of generations of Americans. It is important, however, to remember that slavery comes in many forms, and one form was what we now dismiss as "indentured servitude." When the word "slavery" is used, white people have a tendency to dismiss it because it doesn't seem relevant to them; but the entire Colonial period is full of coded language, which is designed to draw one's attention away from the true events of history. The fact is that the great majority of indentured servants were white, and they were treated as the equals of a slave.

The slavemaster mentality included a self-defense mechanism that amounted to a patronizing form of contempt for the slaves, who they kept deliberately ignorant while deluding themselves that the slaves were like "members of the family." Once the slaves were freed there was genuine surprise on the part of many of the old slave-owning families that slaves whom they thought genuinely loved them, deserted them. Typical of the slave-owning caste was Thomas Jefferson, who was reputed to have owned over 150 slaves. He believed that black people were biologically inferior to white people, at a time when educated people knew this to be false. He held that black people were pre-disposed to theft, and that they were less intelligent than white people, as well as less pleasant to the eye (which did not stop him from possibly fathering a child with one of his black slaves). Not only did Jefferson hold black people in contempt, his entire scheme for a public school system belied his true sentiment that the entire American people were too stupid to be self-governing, and that a school system was necessary to recruit and train a specialized elite to run the government. Of course, these facts have been known for over 200 years, but we never hear them recited in the mass media.

The American Revolution was not a genuine revolution in the sense of the French Revolution. The French Revolution constituted a melt-down of the European civilization, France being the virtual center of it at the time. The American Revolution, in contrast, was a controlled burn. It had a reactionary taint to it, having been initiated by the landed elite rather than the poor masses. The leaders of the American Revolution were openly hostile to ideas of "democracy," and they were very careful to define a type of freedom that they could control. It was not by accident that the majority of the so-called "best minds of the time," who gathered to lead the Revolution, and who later, in 1787, drafted the Constitution, were attorneys. The United States became the empire of the attorneys, guaranteeing to those who entered the profession a kind of special status of the kind that was once preserved for the high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem. The only difference was that the priests made an attempt to serve God, where the attorneys of America all serve the Almighty Dollar.

There is a tendency in modern America to disconnect modern events from historic institutions, which is fueled by mass media campaigns that enthrall us with the latest soap products, or the cutest new movie star. There is an "I GOT MINE" attitude that prevails, not because the people of America are greedy or selfish, but because the entire culture is put under pressure to sustain the markets that are the central focus of the republic. Those who refuse to participate are marginalized as untouchables. They become the "criminals." And our social amnesia helps us to forget that the same Government that is now supposed to protect our freedom, once defined the pursuit of freedom by those people euphemistically called "slaves," as a criminal act under law!

People who feel that the deck is stacked against them will feel as if their backs are up against the wall, and they will do things that are irrational and desperate. This is the legacy of race relations between black Americans and white Americans, one which white America is largely in denial about. Many white people hold a flippant attitude that slavery existed long ago, and modern people have to just "Get on with it." The reality, however, is that the living black community evolved from a culture of subjugation, in which they were often deprived of vital information about themselves. This was the poignant purpose for the "X" in the name of Malcolm X, the "X" standing for the unknown patrimony of the black people, deprived of true family names and identity by the white-controlled culture that enslaved them. Ironically, many of the freed slaves wound up bearing the surnames of those families that had owned them, so that in a strange twist of fate, many of the slave-owning families did wind up linked to the descendants of their slaves in an almost family-like manner.

What we cleverly never hear about was the willingness of the slavemasters to use tricks and manipulation to accomplish their ends. It should come as no surprise that the same people who would consider it a fair bargain to buy Manhattan Island for glass beads, would also think nothing of filling their slaves' minds with all kinds of thoughts about the uselessness of resisting enslavement. In a society where the enslaved population outnumbered the free population, the subtle use of deception was indispensable. This same dynamic can be found in such slogans as that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of which it was said, "the FBI always gets its man..." This is a subtle psychological threat to anyone who gets targeted for investigation by the FBI, while employing the poor excuse that innocent people have nothing to hide. (Of course, this does not explain why the Founding Fathers found it necessary to put a clause in the Constitution of 1787 specifically empowering the United States Government to keep secrets from the American people, the supposed principals in the "social contract,"who have allegedly "contracted" to "hire" the bureaucracy as its "agent.")

It is impossible to explain the real fears that can be raised by one's own imagination. The most skilled terrorists do not issue blanket threats, they learn their enemies inside and out, and they get very personal in their attacks. When it is discerned that an individual is afraid of the dark, he may be subjected to darkness. If it is learned that he is afraid of water, he may be subjected to water. The particular and unique fears of individuals are learned and then deployed against them, in a merciless pursuit of their submission. Keeping the psychological upper hand was of tantamount importance to the slavemaster, and it was a matter of state policy for the perpetuation of the slave state. For this purpose racism was devised using misquoted Biblical passages to give the color of divine favor to a scheme that had no real purpose other than the protection of property. Everywhere European colonies blossomed the doctrines of racism came to be applied, largely because racism created the illusion of "racial solidarity," enabling the ruling class in Europe to export the low-born Europeans to overseas colonies, where they were employed managing the slaves, who usually had flesh of a darker color than the white Europeans. They were also uniformly non-Christian, and all the great ideals of Christian love only applied to Christians. Under the Christian Creed it is a sin to enslave another Christian, but if enslavement has as its purpose the Christianization of a race, then enslavement can be justified because it is viewed as a form of improvement. This twisted logic can also be found in the anti-semitism of the Nazis, who defined Semites as sub-humans comparable to vermin, vermin being a pestilence that the human race had long ago agreed had to be exterminated anywhere found for purely hygenic reasons. The psychological edge derives from the ability to demoralize an adversary into submission without defending himself.

It is imperative that contemporary Americans have a full grasp on the reality of the institution of slavery as it existed in America for centuries, so that any nonsense about slavery being a benign or benevolent institution is refuted. The tensions caused by slavery had a polarizing and freezing effect, which the Government skillfully used to keep the American population divided. It was seen as a measure of self-survival to the dominant white class that those people held in servitude be made dependent upon their masters for all things. This not only meant dependency for food, shelter or medicine, it also included dependency on the masters for acceptance, approval and mutual loyalty. This was accomplished by a systematic process of reduction by which the slaves became completely subject to their "owners," which is highlighted by the clause in the Constitution requiring the Federal Government to return fugitive slaves to their bondage. We forget that it was not a crime to kill a disobedient slave, for homicide was a crime that could only take place when a legal natural person was killed, and slaves were property -- like a pet, or livestock -- who had no legal rights. Through the establishment of a legal system that was based upon the Dredd Scott Supreme Court decision, an institutionalized form of private terrorism became part of the accepted everyday routine of the state, which appeared increasingly as a juggernaut that could roll over any hapless slave that even whispered of his or her discontent. This created a backlash among the slaves, who learned not to speak their minds honestly or openly because of the trouble it caused them. This was a form of dissembling that the black people learned as a skill for survival, but it led to a psychological condition whereby millions of black people who practiced dissembling found that they,THEMSELVES, were uncertain of their own thoughts. What was once a device for survival under a barbaric and predatory social system, became an albatross, but it was too late for the entire black community to unlearn something it took generations to master.

Keeping an enslaved population unable to read or write speaks directly to the reality that knowledge is power, and depriving an underclass of such skills is a direct body-blow to that particular group, designed to keep that population powerless. Furthermore, the only reason to keep any group powerless is because they are the subject of abuse, and if empowered they might seek to defend themselves, or worse, retaliate. This underlying dread of retaliation permeated the entire Colonial and early republican society, which was intensified when industrialization made slavery uneconomical and counter-productive. The emancipation of slaves in every country has been a period of enormous upheaval, largely because whenever a form of property is outlawed -- property only having existence in the law -- it resulted in financial losses, and sometimes ruin, to those who were invested in the kind of property that was made illegal to own. Yet the abolition of slavery had the additional impact of releasing an uneducated, psychologically dependent population to "freedom," who had been beaten like dogs when enslaved, and who carried the memory of that inhuman abuse into the future. This fueled the growing rivalry between the former slaves and the educated white males who easily outqualified the uneducated former slaves for what jobs that became available as a result of the new industrialization. The blacks soon found that they had been set free with the right hand of the Man, but were being kept down with his left hand. After the Civil War, when the state no longer sided with the slavemasters against their slaves, the slavemasters who had dominated the society through legal terrorism, now dominated it with good old-fashioned American vigilante terrorism, following the example of the Sons of Liberty (whose most famous heroic deed amounted to burglarizing a ship in the Port of Boston to destroy and vandalize private property, while dressed as native American Indians so that the "savage" natives would be blamed if anyone witnessed what was later dignified under the title, The Boston Tea Party). This was how the Klu Klux Klan came into being, and contemporary Americans often forget that the Invisible Empire was just that, INVISIBLE. Yet it claimed some of the most powerful members of local communities as members: judges, lawyers, merchants, teachers, city councilmen, legislators. When the Klan came to a town it was an open secret that all the movers and shakers were in on, which served all of their purposes for intrigue, especially because they could act secretly behind cloaks, protected by a code of silence that is rivalled only by the code of silence of the law enforcement profession.

We forget about the social taboos that not only forbade a black man fraternizing with white women, but which justified a lynching in order to redeem the "honor" of all white women. The fact that laws had to be adopted punishing and criminalizing inter-marriage of blacks and whites, speaks to the underlying magnetic appeal that these two groups felt for each other on an organic basis. The lynchings, however, were not only directed at those innumerable targets who met such miserable and unjust deaths, they were directed at the living black population as a warning as to what they could expect if they also crossed the line. It was a warning to the black people not to aspire too highly, bluntly spelling out the kind of fate they could expect if they refused to accept their "place" in the society. While the organized terrorism of the KKK has declined to some extent as a result of its suppression by an image conscious republic desperately trying to salvage its existence, the flesh-and-blood PEOPLE who hold the racist opinions that were handed down to them from their ancestors, which motivated them to support the KKK, are now simply directing their energies into new organizations, such as political parties.

Any discussion about welfare or Affirmative Action, or even the system of law enforcement and justice, cannot go forward if the American people are not fully aware of the history of those people who constitute the targets of these programs. Ideological labels like "conservative" or "liberal" revolve around technical definitions, such as the existence of "private" versus "public" property, that have the same relevance to the collapse of Western Civilization as the number of angels that can fit on the tip of a pin. Most conservatives would probably be surprised to learn that the first modern state to offer any kind of a social program was not a liberal state, but the super-conservative German Empire of Prince Otto von Bismarck. Additionally, these programs were not provided for the welfare of the population, but for the preservation of the state. Ironically, the welfare system in the United States did not originate as some kind-hearted gesture of liberal politicians, but was a pragmatic act of the Republican Nixon Administration to placate a population that was near the verge of revolution. It was through the welfare system that the republic was able to blackmail the poor with cash payments, which would be withdrawn if any welfare recipients were involved in any forms of political protest that were significant, in other words, illegal. This is because legal means to protest were designed to allow people with grievances to vent their anger, but the grievances could not lead to any concrete actions or reforms. All legal actions were reserved to the legislators, who had to endure an obstacle course to win election, which served to weed out individuals pursuing agendas that would conflict with the plans of the powerful.

The middle class is a submissive group of people who are literally a demographic creation of the blue-blood billionaire class. The middle class has a system of unspoken rules and glass ceilings, penned in with the legislated morality of the republic's institutions. The prisons of the republic are not only a way to punish so-called "law-breakers," they are the means by which the slave state marginalizes dissent, which partially explains why such a large percentage of those in prisons are the black children and grandchildren of former slaves. Those black people who accept their "lot in life" by being placated with welfare payments are thus rewarded with cash payments to stay silent. While those who are genuinely angry over the abuse they and their ancestors suffered under a social system that to this day is defined by the master-and-servant relationship, and who refuse to be silent, are summarily remanded to prisons, in which they are actually returned to the status of slaves: publicly owned slaves. While many of the prisoners have actually committed truly awful crimes, it is important to understand that they did those crimes because they had no lawful or moral role models to style themselves on. Every potential cultural leader of the former slaves has been brutally murdered, often with the unofficial sanction of the Federal Government, out of an ancient fear that this class of suppressed human beings might find some way to strike back at its tormentors.

The American welfare system is operated like a gigantic parole system, in which those people who compromise their freedom by applying for the republic's money -- actually money they paid in themselves, in the form of taxes, when they had better times -- are coerced into signing away their constitutional rights to privacy, due process, and freedom of expression. The applicant is put through a battery of tests designed to thwart their eligibility for assistance. While on the face of it this process of qualification appears to serve the honest purpose of weeding out those applicants who are not actually entitled to welfare, the truth is that the whole application process is meant to send the message to the recipient that he or she is entitled to nothing more than what the welfare system bestows upon them, which they are not entitled to think of as any kind of return for all the years of taxes paid, but as a gift from the Government, for which the recipient is expected to be grateful. This convoluted line of reason dismisses as worthless the contributions made by the applicant to the society, in the form of taxes, and raises up the value of the pittance the successful welfare recipient shall receive, so that the entire transaction appears to be a one-way street, as an act of largesse from the all-powerful republic to the unworthy citizen.

Reporters do regular articles on the welfare system, highlighting all the poor and helpless people the system grinds into poverty through its programs, but the system is represented as the only salvation for those who cannot live up to the Puritan Work Ethic. The prison guard mentality of the social workers is never touched upon, who have been known to act with all the sincerity and straight-forwardness of a hard-edged middle manager. Many of the bureaucrats are barely functionally literate, and even more are former mental health patients who chose careers in a field they had experience in as clients. You couldn't find a better illustration of the notion of the blind leading the blind, which may explain why the country is in such bad shape today.

What is often overlooked by pundits is the sentiment generated by the news media of some kind of unfairness taking place. Welfare recipients are not unfortunate human beings down on their luck; no, they are irresponsible deadbeats whose lack of loyalty to the Puritan slave ethic is deemed just short of a criminal act. In fact the solutions to the welfare system as they are put forward by the various interest groups involved, reveal the genuine outlook of their sponsors as to the value of human life, and the responsibility of the society to its individual members. Regardless of party affiliation, all the "responsible" parties advocate the creation of a new make-work bureaucracy to fill the days of welfare recipients with that life-blood of the Puritan ethic, WORK, regardless of what it accomplishes, how much it pays, or even if it fulfills a genuine social need. It reflects the mentality that individuals are not entitled to be free to make their own life choices, and that these choices should be made by a bureaucracy of college-educated policy wonks, who view the people on welfare as expendable statistics. The very notion that any work is better than no work brings to mind the familiar image of convicted prisoners spending the rest of their days breaking down boulders into gravel with hand tools, not because the work is redeeming, or because it might teach the individuals the valor of work, or the value of contributing something to the human community, but because "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Ironically, however, whereas prisoners in prison actually committed some kind of offense for which they were convicted, welfare recipients never enjoy the benefits of a trial, they are judged guilty upon having walked in the door to apply for help, and they are convicted and punished for nothing more than having fallen on hard times.

More to the point, however, such "innovations" as the Governor of Michigan's "Department of Jobs" bears the distinct imprint of the corporate state, which was the product of Mussolini and Hitler, who were the first to devise a society in which everyone's place is designated from above based on scientific theories of specialization and the division of labor. It is amazing how so-called conservatives can call for forcing welfare mothers to work, even at jobs that are specially made for them by the state, and not recognize in this proposal a call to construct a Soviet Union in America, wherein the Government "guarantees" every citizen a job. Not to be outdone, the so-called liberals have set out proposals to reform welfare, none of which involve examining the bureaucracy to find out what is wrong with it. Every proposal starts with the beginning assumption that the fault lies in the American people. This speaks directly to the war of perceptions, because to the average person informed by the shoddy journalism of the mass media, the problem with the welfare system is not that it suspends the civil rights of welfare recipients, or that those who administer the program go out of their way to make the lives of welfare recipients a living hell, or that the awards that are paid out do not actually cover the expenses of the families who are tied down with a maze of rules that are selectively enforced. To the man-on-the-street it would appear that what is wrong with the system is that it is too lenient!

Those warm-hearted "liberals" are giving too much away to "undeserving parasites"... Due to the one-sided coverage of the welfare issue, the media has portrayed the biggest problem facing the welfare system as welfare "fraud." This "fraud" is then meticulously defined as individuals cheating the Government of "its" money, by accepting money they are not entitled to, AND WHAT IMMEDIATELY COMES TO MIND IS A LAZY UNWED TEENAGE MOTHER, the stereotype of a mis-spent life, who refuses to work to support herself or her child. The reality of welfare fraud, however, is something totally different. This is because the great majority of welfare recipients take it all very seriously, and the majority work towards getting off the welfare rolls. They do this not only because it is a horrible experience to live under the shadow of a powerful bureaucracy that can do as it pleases, and its victims are never given a fair opportunity to voice their grievances. They do it because they have pride in themselves, and because they have suffered through hard-times, often through no fault of their own, and they look for opportunities to get back on their feet. This brings us to the reality of welfare fraud: The great majority of welfare fraud cases are filed against welfare recipients whose welfare payments do not cover their expenses, and who WORK ON THE SIDE and neglect to report their earnings because the welfare system would actually deduct money from what are already inadequite payments. The irony is that women whose crime is to work on the side, are portrayed in the media as being lazy!

While the Federal Government will send out monthly checks to drug addicts for being disabled, it will not pay for the shelters that could be the avenue to salvation for most of them. The Government knows that the drug addicts will use the money to acquire drugs, rather than pay rent, yet it won't send the money for the rent directly to the shelter. The underlying objective of the Government is to finance the drug addict's eventual death by overdose. The Federal Government refuses to admit that America is in a watershed period, and that extraordinary care is necessary to keep the country from fully unravelling. Local governments, in fact, have been instrumental in closing homeless shelters, such as the City of Dana Point, California, which closed the soup kitchen and the homeless shelter of the Regent of the United States, after imposing a $1,900.00 fee on the non-profit foundation of the Regent TO MERELY REVIEW HIS REQUEST FOR A CONDITIONAL USE PERMIT! $1,900.00 every city councilman, and every Planning Department official KNEW the foundation did not have. Today, where the homeless shelter was once located, the City of Dana Point is experiencing a crime wave, but no one wants to tie this in with the fact that there are no services for the poor in Dana Point now. There is a failure on the part of the Government to realize that with appropriate services, the homeless population is harmless, but when neglected, it has all the characteristics of a mounting catastrophe.

One of the homeless clients of the shelter was a 17-year-old pregnant girl, who was scared and friendless, and going through the trauma of pregnancy with the aid of an equally immature and undeveloped 18-year-old boyfriend who was the father of her unborn child. The Regent automatically accepted these and all homeless children into his shelters, no questions asked, because he feels that it is the obligation of the adult community to take care of our children, the children of America, together. Yet the shelter received no funding from any government agencies, and so the homeless clients had to apply individually for whatever assistance they were entitled to, in order to pay small rents to the non-profit foundation, to enable it to pay its bills.

The teenage girl was reluctant to apply for welfare because she had heard about how the Social Services Department had a reputation for taking away the babies of young mothers, often on dubious grounds. But she also understood that the foundation relied on her to make small rent payments in order to keep the shelter functioning as a public service, because the local governments completely refused to help fund it. So she reluctantly decided to put her fears aside, and make the sacrifice by applying for help with Aid for Families with Dependent Children. At one point the eligibility technician asked this frightened, illiterate girl, going through one of the most serious episodes of her and her child's life:

"DO YOU REALLY WANT TO TAKE MONEY FROM GOVERNOR WILSON?"