Opinions: Feeling the heat

 by Brett Livingood
 published on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

As I felt summer nearing, and sensed how we're all dreaming about our vacations to … our parent's homes (free room, board, AND cable!), I couldn't help but want to come up with a perfect column to leave students with deep questions to erase with our summer antics.

In fact, I came up with a pretty good idea. As I was back at my mom's house washing clothes, or watching my nephews, or maybe running my underground drug empire, I saw the old faithful East Valley Tribune on the kitchen table. You see, my past and future home is in West Mesa, and according to the Tribune, my old 50-plus percent Hispanic neighborhood is going to be the next target of racial-profiling, anti-immigration raids by Sheriff Joe's acolytes.

Naturally, I was pretty enthusiastic at the thought of my old friends and acquaintances being arbitrarily stopped and arrested for minor traffic violations simply because their skin has more melanin than mine. I mean, hey, it's obviously their fault that their skin color is darker than mine — when we told God how we wanted our DNA to turn out, he (or she) happily obliged.

And besides, what's a little injustice so long as hard -working, honest people can be deported back to their "home" countries, just to risk their lives trying to come back? Shoot, we can even give Sheriff Joe some more publicity too: win-win!

Seriously, that would have been a good topic, right? Sheriff Joe and anti-immigration equals pure evil, with a little unfunny sarcasm thrown in. It's been done, but it'd work, and I could even have given my pseudo-insider opinion on the whole deal and how it's seriously going mess up the Mesa Police Department.

Since I came up with that topic, though, I heard about another troubling situation: apparently Arizona's Department of Economic Security is also slightly evil and in need of some critical unfunny sarcasm.

There's this young woman I know who has an almost-two-year-old son. Since she's a college student — and therefore a fellow poor person — she applied for health insurance with DES for her and her son. She actually qualified for it, too, as did the father of her child. Despite the overbearing influence of Reaganomics on the Arizona Legislature, the infinitely small trickle of tax dollars does somehow manage to help a few people.

But then her son didn't qualify. Apparently, DES splits a parent's income in half — half counts for the parent, half counts for the kid if he/she lives with the parent. So, the mother had half of her income counted, and the father of her son had half of his income counted, while the kid got the other two halves. According to DES, that almost-two-year-old kid makes as much as either of his parents — seriously.

I guess DES would much rather have people get their pesky molars removed than for a kid to get the shots he needs to be healthy.

Now don't get me wrong, I ain't no Wesley Snipes — when April 15 rolls around, I honestly feel appreciative to pay my taxes. I'm not kidding at all by saying that when the government wants my money, I'm more than happy to give some and let the government do good with it (not that I actually make enough to pay taxes, so this is all in theory).

But there's something wrong with a welfare agency intending to help people just causing more grief.

In the end, I guess I just wrote about two topics — I suppose it's because I couldn't decide between the two. But either way, the point of this column is to simply ask: Why is it that people dedicated to justice can so easily cause injustice? And why can an agency intent on promoting the general welfare so easily cause the exact opposite?

I guess that's just how our occasionally f---ed up, hypocritical world works. Good thing for alcohol, summer vacation and Bavarian sugar cookies.

Brett can be reached by e-mail at: brett.livingood@asu.edu.