Another social reform policy that has negatively affected the people it was supposed to help is welfare policy. Welfare does a lot of good for a person who is momentarily struggling, and it does a lot of good for those who can’t provide for themselves, like the truly mentally and physically disabled. But consider this, Stephen Hawking was never on welfare.

Again, this policy tells people that if they fall into a certain group, then this is the option they should take. And why not? It’s free.

I have been a recipient of government welfare, and I can speak to its benefits and its dangers. The trap of welfare is real. After a serious work injury, I went back to school. At the end of my first semester, my wife gave birth to our first child. As I made a living as a graduate assistant, we had little money to spare, and not enough for medical expenses. We applied for state assistance, which included baby supplies, food, and medical insurance for my wife and our child. We carried these benefits until after our second child was born 2 1/2 years later. By this time, I had a degree and was back at work. Our family had landed once again on a solid foundation, even though I had an injury that didn’t allow me to participate in many sectors of the workforce.

When the state sent a renewal letter for our benefits, we had to make a decision. Do we want to keep these benefits, or strike out on our own and become more than what these benefits represent to us?

The temptation was real, as was the opportunity.

We sent back the renewal application blank and included a letter saying thank you for the help; it blessed our family greatly, but we no longer needed the assistance.

The alternative: to keep the benefits, maybe stay in school longer than I needed to, and since the welfare culture was intruding into our future, use the injury I had suffered to claim disability.

Staying on welfare would have held our family back. We would have stayed in poverty for the sake of free benefits paid for by our neighbors. Instead, I went back to work and we are financially secure enough that my wife has been able to stay home, raise our kids, and provide them with a homeschool education(she does this with her diploma for her Master’s degree hanging on the wall in our home classroom).

I don’t speak to the issue of race only from my own meditations and experiences. I’ve read books written by Critical Race Theory authors, like Kendi, Tatum, and Coates. Yes, I’ve read the opposing arguments, and that is something we all need to do. When there is something we don’t understand, we need to search for the understanding we don’t have. These books have given me sympathy for the Black experience, which, while I haven’t changed my core views, opens the door for a more meaningful and productive conversation.

We miss this in America, where our views of the opposition are given to us by social media algorithms and corporately influenced news outlets. We are being conditioned to hate the other side, not to understand them. Understanding leads to progress.