The mayoral pack has taken to poverty tourism — a series of “challenges” that are supposed to illustrate how tough it is to live in the projects or on Food Stamps or the minimum wage. It’s an obscene farce, for many reasons.
Before Food Stamps, there was Surplus Food. Once a month or so, your mom and some helpers would head down to a garage and pick up boxes of government food — dried beans, powdered milk, canned “luncheon meat” and so on.
Of course, that wasn’t all you ate — these programs have always been supplemental, there to make sure families got enough. (Which is just one annoying thing about candidates trying to eat on Food Stamps only, as if anybody does that.)
In fact, most of it was the last thing you ate. The milk was gross — nearly impossible to fully mix, so you always wound up with powdery globs in the glass and glop at the bottom of the pitcher. The “meat” was worse, tasting mostly of salt.
Anyway, the luncheon meat didn’t last forever: America progressed to Food Stamps; you used them to buy the same food as everyone else, though you had to put up with the shame of handing over the coupons in lieu of cash at the register.
When you got sent to the corner store to buy a gallon of milk, you tried to talk your mom into giving you some cash instead of stamps to pay for it.
Thing is, if times are hard enough that your mom has swallowed her pride to go on welfare in the first place, then money is always tight. You don’t take vacations like other kids; you wear Wrangler jeans, not Levi’s. You have to convince your mom you really, really want that copy of Giant-Sized X-Men No. 1 before she’ll shell out the 50 cents.
And when you need your first pair of glasses, you find that Medicaid won’t pay for the cool frames you want, so you’re stuck with the dorky plastic ones. Live with it.
You learn early on not to ask for stuff that the family just can’t afford, but it eats at you, month after month, year after year.
It’s not that life is bad; you still get a childhood because your mom’s determined that you will. And you have some neat stuff. (That’s why, years later, you don’t begrudge any mom who wants her kids to have something nice — though you wonder about the designer sneakers, let alone iPhones.)
Anyway, the lessons sink in: You get pretty determined not to ever need help, and damned reluctant to ask for anything that resembles it. Because the flip side of shame is pride — pride that you can do it yourself, and you will. And you do.
None of this is anything a poverty tourist is going to learn; they’re there for the photo op; “Message: I Care.” It’s hard to think of a greater insult.
But there’s another lesson here, one that’s definitely not part of the poverty tour.
Skip ahead a few decades; you’re with your wife in the maternity ward at New York-Presbyterian after a C-section, sharing a room with a very sweet 20-something we’ll call Sheré.
You’re there because you’ve got good health insurance and the wife determined it was the best place in the city to give birth. But it takes a couple of days to get a private room, so you get to chat with Sheré, who says she means to become a pediatric medical assistant someday, though she has to get her GED first.
Your sister-in-law, up to lend a much-appreciated hand for a few days, can’t resist asking Sheré how she can afford such an expensive hospital. Sheré laughs, “I’m not paying for this — I’ve got Medicaid.”
She had her first three kids (different fathers; the latest, whom she met in the shelter, is still with her, but home keeping an eye on the other children) in a Bronx hospital. But, she proudly explains, she finally figured out that she could walk in anywhere, and they had to take her. So there she is.
Actually, she’s been at New York Presbyterian for a month; the doctors decided she was high-risk (she’d tested positive for cannabis before she knew she was pregnant), so they’ve had her staying there to be safe.
You keep your mouth shut — just as you change the channel when of those “You probably qualify for Medicaid” radio ads comes on, the way you avert your eyes from posters pushing Food Stamps.
The way you try not to think about how no kid has to buy milk with Food Stamps anymore, because it’s all done with Electronic Benefit Transfer cards.
What galls is the assumption — the carefully honed, relentless message — that there’s nothing wrong with taking all this. It’s not charity, just the way things work. Nothing to be ashamed of.
And no reason, either, to sweat to build real reasons for pride. Hey, we’ve all got self-esteem now.
Mark Cunningham is The Post’s oped editor.