FT got a call from Mama Wolf today. No "thank you" for taking care of her son this past weekend -- although we didn't expect that anyway. She did relate, like a naughty schoolgirl, how she was playing the system down at the local unemployment office by feigning looking for work so that the agency will pay to have the family car fixed; she has no intention, you see, of actually getting a job, but she makes the rounds of various businesses, has someone sign her paperwork and goes back to the unemployment office with seeming evidence of her having looked for work. After sharing this, she went in for the shakedown: Could she expect that we'd be buying her other two children new school clothes and shoes too?
This woman brings out my inner Scrooge: "Are there no workhouses?" I'd like to introduce her lazy posterior to the joys of manual labor. Grrrrrr.
3 comments:
Apparently she isn't poor because she doesn't have brains, and she does have the motivation to go door to door. The problem must be lack of moral fiber.
My son went door to door once looking for a place he had heard of that was a possible job site. And he found it. He is persistent is a good way. All my kids are currently unemployed because of the economy. Even the one who is a pastor-to-be. You'd think that there'd be a church wanting a pastor.
She's smart enough to be dangerous.
Something about the banality of evil comes to mind. I'm not much for pop psychology, but M. Scott Peck's "People of the Lie" seems more and more true in my thankfully-infrequent interactions with genuinely evil people. There's a pathology at work in this family that is more than just inconvenient: it's dangerous to the world and, most tragically, the children involved.
I must say again, thank goodness you & FT are providing a competitive witness for how life might be lived.
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