Mark Kirkwood (L) at a diner in Detroit. Photograph by Peter van Agtmael - Magnum for TIME
Arlington Heights, Ill.
Traveling Companion: Jim Pinkerton
Event: Actually, this happened a few days ago in Detroit.
I’ve been thinking about a story I was told over breakfast in Detroit on Saturday–a monologue, almost–by Mark Kirkwood, who works at Statewide Disaster Restoration, a company that rebuilds homes and buildings that have suffered water or fire damage. Kirkwood is an Army veteran; he has a brother and a son who are in the Army. I had asked him about the Quran burning and he said, “I don’t understand why you guys in the media get so upset about that and when someone burns the American flag overseas it’s, ok, yeah, go ahead–who cares? I mean, if someone burns a flag in front of one of our bases–and they do–it’s guaranteed to drive our soldiers nuts, but where are you?
“We raise our kids to believe you have to stand for something, but what do we stand for? We’re tolerant to the point of giving up too much. You call up a service company and you hear, ‘press 2 for Spanish,’ do they have ‘press two for English’ in Venezuela? I doubt it. Why do we have to keep giving things away–giving our jobs overseas, giving money to people who don’t deserve it?
“I was at the gym the other day, working out. This big guy next to me is really ripped, wearing bling and fancy gym clothes. I asked him about his diet. He said it was high protein. ‘The really good stuff is buffalo meat,’ he said. ‘It costs $8 a pound, but it’s high protein low fat.’ I asked him how he could afford buffalo meat and said, ‘I just swipe my Bridge card [apparently a form of food stamps, distributed by the state of Michigan] and it goes through.’ I was really angry, but I kept it to myself. I just said, ‘You’re on welfare?’ He said, ‘I’m on disability.’ I’m thinking, disability? He was lifting more than I was.”
The Michigan “Bridge Card” is basically a debit card for low-income people to access state coffers. There’s been no shortage of reported scams, schemes and abuses. This year, with a record 1.7 million getting a piece, state legislators made a bid to sift out college students who don’t really need them and people who trade benefits for drugs and alcohol. Buffalo meat seems the least of their worries. – Katy Steinmetz
You hear these stories. I don’t know how widespread this sort of fraud is, but you do hear these stories. And every one of them, it seems, goes viral–because most people, like Mark Kirkwood, are struggling to get by and are infuriated by people–as the UAW firecracker Tammy Jackson said the other day–“who are trying to get over.”
I’ve written this before, but if Democrats want people to trust the government, they’re going to have to manage the government far better than they’re doing it now.
This post is part of my Election Road Trip 2010 project. To track my location across the country, and read all my road trip posts, click here.