We know full well how many aspects of the safety net held us up. We didn’t qualify for Section 8 housing or “welfare” because my parents stayed together. Family legend holds that a social worker hinted my dad should officially move out and “sneak in the window at night” to qualify his kids for more benefits. We did, however, receive food stamps for two years. They were brown and tan in those days, they came in a perforated booklet, they were labeled FOOD COUPON, they came in dollar increments, and using them was a deep humiliation. They don’t pay for soap, they don’t pay for toilet paper, they don’t pay for cleansers or toothpaste or deodorant.

Nobody can live well off food stamps, but anyone can live. That’s the point. Not only are there no people who “don’t want to work,” there are plenty of people who will only submit to accepting charity as an absolute last resort. They do it for their little children. It’s dehumanizing and it’s barely enough. Thank you, though. Thank you to everyone who paid taxes between 1980 and 1983. I might have grown up with rickets or pellagra if it weren’t for you.

My dad learned his trade due to a government program. My family ate many pounds of surplus cheese due to a government program. We ate due to food stamps, except that time they were three weeks late, and then we ate due to the generosity of a church food bank. My youngest brother was born with a heart defect, and he lived due to publicly funded health insurance. We all went to public school. We became homeowners due to a government program. I spent half my life in the public library, and thank you most of all for that. I sometimes imagine how my waifish self appeared to the many kind librarians who saw me walk in the door every day, a scruffy testament to the power of literacy.

We lived in an apartment complex which housed about three-quarters poor whites and one-quarter Southeast Asian refugees. They were mostly Vietnamese, with a few Laos and Cambodian families. It was clear to me as a child that refugees are frightened, vulnerable people with bone-deep gratitude toward their place of sanctuary. The Asian kids were all petrified of dogs. One of the dads spoke to our fourth grade class about fleeing the Khmer Rouge, and then we understood why. We grew up among industrious, generous families who cooked traditional foods for us, dried fish in their yards, and eventually saved up enough money to start their own businesses and buy homes. Many of the white families complained about them and chalked up their success to government grants and quota systems. At the same time, they grudgingly admired how extended families would pool resources and form mutual aid societies. It seemed obvious to me from the age of 7 that we would do better to take a page out of their playbook. Our Asian neighbors only ever saw our apartment complex as a way station; we lived there for 10 years.

We saw racism and bigotry in action every day. We saw police brutality as a matter of course, although we also saw heroic cops in a 12-hour stakeout in the rain when the whackaloon started sniping people out his living room window. I grew up surrounded by petty crime and drug deals. One of our neighbors nearly burned down the building when she fell asleep drunk with a lit cigarette in her hand. An entire family in our complex died from carbon monoxide poisoning because their heat had been turned off and they were using a Hibachi grill. A man was stabbed to death across the street in broad daylight. The trouble with living in a poor neighborhood is that most of your neighbors suck and your landlord thinks you’re one of them.

I was 9 the day my mom finished our taxes and started dancing in her seat. She realized we had finally reached the official federal poverty line. That was the first of two socioeconomic class boundaries I have crossed in my time. We were able to fight our way out of the crab pot due to the socially provided benefits of education, health insurance, government grants, food stamps, subsidized loans, police and fire emergency response, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and probably many other benefits. Without all of these programs, we would have been like medieval peasants in a hut. With them, my parents were able to make their way to prosperity, and it has rippled down two generations so far. What all that public assistance money did was to build five tax-generating machines, investing in the creation of new Economic Productivity Units. With anything more, maybe we could have done it sooner.