Anecdotal Evidence

I said before that I was giving you anecdotal evidence because that's all I've got on this subject. I agree that some of it doesn't make sense, but lots of things that people do don't make sense. I have not researched this subject, and don't plan to because I'm not all that interested in it but, since you brought it up, I am sharing what I remember reading or hearing about it at the time. Speaking of time, don't forget that we are talking about the 60s here. A lot of shit that went down in those days would not be tolerated today, which is probably for the best.

I remember reading about welfare programs in the South back when this civil rights thing was just getting started. Apparently, they were denying these benefits to Blacks because I remember some civil rights leader telling them to "Demand your entitlements." I think that what was going on in Northern  Michigan was that they didn't have a lot of money in the budget for that sort of thing, and weren't interested in expanding the programs, so they didn't publicize the fact that these programs existed at all. Around the time I moved here, there was a  big influx of White refugees from Detroit, and there was a lot of resentment about how the Blacks had "taken over" that city. Cheboygan people had  ties to Detroit because they used to go there to find work, and many of them had friends or relatives still living down there. I think that court case in the U.P. involved somebody who tried to apply for welfare and was told that there was no such a thing. This young lawyer, Joe Swallow, who was probably trying to make a name for himself so that he could go into politics, which he eventually did, jumped on the case. Like I said, I don't think I ever heard how the case came out, but I do remember that Swallow's argument was that, since Black people in Detroit were collecting welfare, White people in the U.P. should be eligible for it too.

When I first moved here, Cheboygan had only recently started recovering from the Great Depression, which had started earlier here than in some other parts of the country. My father-in-law told me that, if he hadn't read about the Depression in the newspaper, he wouldn't have known anything about it, because their lives were pretty much the same before, during, and after the Depression. Some of the rural areas around here didn't even have electricity until the 1950s, and a few homes still didn't have running water when I arrived. Except for few well connected families, poverty had been a way of life for so long that many people were just resigned to it. Those who weren't went to Detroit to find work, and now that option had been closed off to them.

Back in those days, us right wing nuts were all paranoid about the U.S. becoming a "welfare state". Looking back on it now, I think we got it backwards. Welfare was developed as a response to poverty, it was not the primary cause of it. We were always complaining about our taxes going up. Little did we know that, someday, many of our incomes would be reduced to the point that we wouldn't even have to pay taxes anymore. Maybe that's one reason there are so many poor people around today, they have raised the bar as to what qualifies as "poor".

I agree that you shouldn't build your argument around meaningless clichés, but I don't see anything wrong with throwing a cliché in there on top of everything else if it seems appropriate. "The only thing they understand is force" may be an over used cliché if you apply it to every war the U.S. has ever been involved in, but I think it's fair to say that it is true of the Islamic terrorists we are currently dealing with. When have they tried diplomacy or did anything that didn't involve the use of force? I also agree that the U.S. shouldn't go around telling other countries what to do, but I don't see anything wrong with telling them what not to do, like "Don't hijack airplanes and crash them into tall buildings, don't set off bombs in the marketplace, don't stone women to death for trying to get a driver's license, and don't put videos of you chopping off somebody's head on the internet."