As Real As It Gets

I was in the convenience store this afternoon, buying fruit juice and lotto tickets* and I witnessed something completely humbling.
  A woman and her daughter were in front of me, the woman buying her daughter a fountain drink.  She handed over a SNAP card to pay - this is what food stamps have been for years now, a debit card - and told the clerk she hoped it went through.  The clerk told the woman to enter her PIN, and then she nodded, the card did indeed have money on it.
  "Thank God," the woman said, "now I can buy food."
  She was not being sarcastic, nor ironic.  She was completely sincere, I could see the tension leave her body when she learned the State had charged up her SNAP card again, with its approximately $1.60 per meal per person.  This woman had been wondering how she was going to feed her family tonight, and was completely relieved when she learned she could indeed put food on her table.
  I wish every one of those dismissive, sarcastic bastards who talk about 'Food Stamp Nation' and welfare mothers could have been in line with me.  I wish I had a camera.  I wish I had a microphone.  This was the real deal, someone living not just paycheck to paycheck but hand to mouth, day by agonizing day.
   Imagine if you were that woman, sweating the addition of - literally - five dollars per person per day to your card so you could eat.  Most people spend way more than $5 at Starbuck's and they don't even count that as a meal, it's a reward.  And when the card went through, the daughter pulled the soda close, she'd been keeping it at arm's length in the event that they wouldn't be able to afford the... 99 cents.
   So why did the woman buy her daughter a soda in a convenience store?  Well, in the first place that's allowed under the rules.  Yes, the destitute can buy soda with their food stamps.  But, more to the point, this woman was buying a soda at a convenience store in order to see if there was enough money that she could go to a proper grocery store.**  As embarrassing as it must be to pay with food stamps, it's got to be 100 times more embarrassing to carry your meager allowance to the cashier only to be told you don't have any money on your card to pay for what little you could get.  Poor people might be poor, but they're still people, they still have pride.
   This episode, which took place not three feet in front of me, made me realize - again - that I'm pretty damned lucky.  I have enough.  Sure, I want more, but I have enough.  God knows I don't miss a meal that often, and when I do it's a choice, not an economic consequence.  They say not to judge someone until you've walked a mile in her shoes, but, honestly, this is as close as I want to get.


* you can't win if you don't play

** kind of like when you use a freshly-stolen credit card at a gas station to see if it's still good before you go buy a big-screen TV.  At least, that's how I hear this sort of thing is done.