The United States recently experienced one of the greatest “booms” in our economic history. More people were working than ever before. People were buying houses at a faster rate than they have in decades. Yet there were many people still living from paycheck to paycheck, or welfare check to welfare check. The subject of welfare stirs different passions in different people. Some say that those who are on welfare should be taken off, with no hope of survival afterward. They should “support themselves,” these people say. Others believe that these welfare recipients should be able to stay on the rolls indefinitely. I think that people who are on welfare, who are physically capable to work, should be required to work. However, I also feel that it would be irresponsible of this country to throw these people into low-paying jobs with no training or education to help them eventually get a better job at a higher wage. We should not “force” them to work; we should help them to work and acquire the skills necessary to maintain a good paying job.
Requiring welfare recipients to work and aiding them along the way in respect to finding a good job lessens the welfare rolls by helping the people to find work. Many times, the only reason a person is on welfare is the simple fact that he looked but was not able to find a job. Many people would love to be able to find an entry-level job, but lack of skills and shrinking job markets make it harder and harder to do. In one of the few pieces I have seen done recently on the national television news programs, a man who had a wife and three children was interviewed. They were on welfare because he had lost his job during the downsizing effor…
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…andchildren of people who worked on the W.P.A. during World War II. While the W.P.A. did require the workers to labor, it was still basically a government welfare program. The government “found” something for the workers to do. They paid the workers with tax dollars. This program helped many people survive the Great Depression. We could take everyone off the welfare rolls today, but if we did not give them any guidance or training, they would be back on the roster within months, if not weeks.
While many people may have many different opinions about welfare-to-work programs, I think that if handled properly, they can be beneficial not only to the state, by lessening the welfare rolls, but also to the worker. We can give them the knowledge that they need to move away from welfare and on to a better, more promising future that lies just ahead of them.
Comparing Pride in A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People and Revelation
Pride in A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People and Revelation
Pride is a very relevant issue in almost everyone’s lives. Only when a person is forced to face his pride can he begin to overcome it. Through the similar themes of her short stories, Flannery O’Connor attempts to make her characters realize their pride and overcome it.
In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother is a typical Southern lady. This constant effort to present herself a Southern lady is where her pride is grounded. She criticizes the mother’s traveling outfit, but she herself is wearing a prim and proper-and probably uncomfortable-outfit so that “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 382). She recalls exactly how to find a certain plantation she used to visit, and the children convince their father to turn the car around. However, the grandmother realizes that the plantation is in another state but is too prideful to admit so. This pride follows her to the point of grace when The Misfit forces her to see reality.
According to Ellen Douglas, the “evil in human hearts, and the possibility of grace, the gift of love, are made terrifyingly and magnificently real” when the grandmother, at gunpoint, admits that The Misfit really is, in her standards, a good man at heart (381). He is better able to express his beliefs about religion, but she has no firm foundation. When he says, “She would [have] been a good woman, if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” he is revealing the fact that her pride, instead of her faith, has carried her through life (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 392). She has merely acted out the life of a typical Southern lady of he…
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…e. Grace allows this change to happen, but one must be willing to face hardships and difficulties because the road to redemption is narrow and rocky.
Works Cited
Douglas, Ellen. “O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.'” Contemporary Literature Criticism. Eds. Carolyn Riley and Phyllis Carmel Mendelson. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1976. Vol. 6. 381.
Edwards, Jr., Bruce L. “O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People.'” Masterplots II-Short Story Series. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Pasedena, CA: Salem P, 1986. Vol. 2. 901-902.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” Meyer 392-406.
——–. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Meyer 381-392.
——–. “Revelation” Meyer 407-420.
Meyer, Michael, ed. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
——–. “O’Connor on Theme and Symbol” Meyer 423-424.