Today’s Guest Saturday post comes to us from A Conservative Teacher. He relates a story of our government insisting people take hand outs they don’t want. This essay was originally published on Thursday, January 3, 2013.
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US Government Rewards Aid Workers Who “Counteract Mountain Pride”
Several months ago in The American Thinker I read an article ‘Mountain Pride’ versus the Welfare State and it stuck with me. Here are the excerpts I want you to focus on:
…The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has an award called the Hunger Champions Awards. One of the winners of 2011’s award was the Social Services department in Ashe County, North Carolina. Their accomplishment: an outreach worker found a new way to convince people to take government handouts, even though those people had decided earlier that they wouldn’t request the handouts. (Quoting directly from the government published document):
Hearing from the outreach worker that benefits could be used to purchase seeds and plants for their gardens turned out to be a very important strategy in counteracting what they described as “mountain pride.”…
…What is truly wretched is that the government is purposefully undermining a norm responsible for maintaining stable families and self-sufficient communities. What is this mountain pride that is such an inconvenience to the welfare state, and who are the people who hold that pride in their hearts? It’s a version of self-reliance — a combination of stubbornness and self-respect. It’s the pride that comes with knowing that your ancestors turned a wilderness into a home, and made it through hard times without taking handouts…
…Mountain pride is the conviction that you must provide for yourself and your family and never turn to the state when you can provide for yourself, even when providing for yourself entails hardship…
The federal government is rewarding taxpayer-paid bureaucrats for working to “counteract” this sort of pride in oneself and desire for self-reliance- bureaucrats are now winning awards given by other bureaucrats based on how successful they are at making people more dependent on the state and are celebrating the debasing of individuals.
Counteracting mountain pride means to take away from individuals who once where full of delight, dignity, honor, satisfaction, and self-trust.
And counteracting mountain pride means to take free citizens of the state and make them instead demure, docile, fawning, low, obedient, obsequious, servile, subjugated, and timid.
Let that sink in for a moment- the government is now giving awards out to government agents who turn happy and strong individuals into weak and low subjects. This is where your tax money is going, right now, today- to awarding those who figure out best how to work to destroy everything that our nation is built on.
The United States Department of Agriculture is now actively engaged in making you into a slave of the state and is now giving awards to those who can best turn you away from freedom and liberty and pride and towards slavery and tyranny and subjugation. It speaks ill for the future of my children that the department sees nothing wrong with this, that the bureaucrats who work in the department see nothing wrong with this, and that our nation sees nothing wrong with electing Representatives and Senators who see nothing wrong with this. This suggests that it isn’t just our elected officials who need to be replaced, but rather the entire culture that is our government that should be replaced for rewarding those who counteract pride. Revolution, I move one step closer to thee.
Asylum Watch 
Oh my God! It’s so brilliantly subtle… Like a drug pusher. “C’mon. One time won’t hurt you. All your friends are doing it. See what all the fuss is about. You won’t get addicted…”
Here is the conundrum for me….
I have a very dear friend who, through no fault of his own, is now in need of Medicaid assistance for his disabled wife. The situation has reached the breaking point. My friend is working three jobs (automotive), yet still he cannot make ends meet. What is sucking up all the money: his wife’s medical bills. Yet, the state where my friend lives keep denying this couple any assistance. WTH???
There is no greater foreign threat than an entitlement mentality