Originally published on She Knows. 

My daughter and I were living in a conservative area when I started to notice an outcry to test people receiving public assistance for drug use. I relied on food stamps to help make ends meet at the time, while I was working full-time as a housecleaner and going to school full-time online.

Social media was my social life, and a few anti-welfare memes or slogans were going around that started to hit home for me. One said that if a person could afford to buy cigarettes and alcohol, then they could, therefore, afford food, and shouldn’t be on food stamps.

Not only that, it seemed people were carefully watching over what people purchased with their food stamps and heavily judged them for it. One person remarked that she couldn’t believe a family bought so much junk with food stamps with their kids “dressed to the nines” in fancy clothes. That makes no sense, I thought. Why is it bad that the kids had nice clothes to wear? Were they supposed to all look like a pack of orphans straight out of the movie Annie?

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