One thing about Lincoln County, we are all for helping our neighbors. Scarcely a week goes by where we don’t have a bean supper, a silent auction, or some other type of fundraiser for someone or something. Sometime it’s a school or local group fundraiser. Like as not, it is for a family recently burned out of their home, or worse.
We have no problem digging into our wallets for people and causes near and dear to our hearts.
However when we think of social services, charity, or “welfare” in the abstract, how many of us think the worst; that everyone with their hand out is like some lazy, lower-case criminal; someone dedicated to scamming the system and loafing through life on the basis of our hard earned labor?
Nobody, Democrat, Republican or other, wants to support people milking the system. Welfare is not supposed to get you through. It is supposed to get you by.
Probably like most things the truth is somewhere in the middle. There are, in fact, people who do their best to make their living off someone else making their living.
The classic case calls service provider after service provider with a tale of woe, usually tailored for the specific occasion, to get what they can.
There are, no doubt, some people good enough at the game to make a comfortable living at it. Some work so hard at scamming their way through life, it makes you wonder how good they would be doing if they devoted their time to honest effort.
Here’s the thing though: even in a worst case scenario, the numbers of people scamming the system right now pale in comparison to the numbers of people who are truly, genuinely hurting these days; people who through no fault of their own are reliant on the services that are available.
Every food pantry, every homeless shelter, just about every service provider in the business can point to a skyrocketing demand for services, all the while our politicians crow about cutting taxes and creating jobs.
With that in mind we commend Wiscasset General Assistance Administrator Lisa Garman’s plan to better organize Lincoln County’s many programs, organizations, and community resources.
If the end result is to make sure those who need get what they need when they need it, and those on the take get little or nothing, we think it’s a good idea and we support it.
The honest demand isn’t going away anytime soon, and it won’t until long after the jobs come back. Until then, our friends and neighbors, on the whole good honest people, are going to have to continue to scrape by as best they can.
