I've been wanting to write this for a while, and since today's a quiet day, I might as well do it now.

There's a new subset of people who are angry at Bush right now, for semi-selfish reasons.

When the economy was good, some of these folks didn't understand at all how anyone could be poor or need to depend on big government. Now that THEY are poor because they lost their jobs and couldn't get another one, and unemployment ran out, all of a sudden they want more benefits and government regulation. I'm hearing it more and more.

Recently, my newspaper got a letter from a woman who was earning $40,000 a few years ago (a very good salary well above the poverty line, although some would scoff at it), and after losing her job and being unable to find another one, she says she'll soon be on the street. She said she tried to get benefits, but was unable to because she's not a "crack mother with 12 kids." Ironically, the point of her article was that you shouldn't judge why someone is on the street.

Now, first off, the crack mother with 12 kids is a myth -- unless she lives in the same neighborhood as the woman with two Cadillacs on Welfare and the "lazy" people who are homeless because it's just so much easier to sleep on the sidewalk and ask for money than go into an air conditioned office and sit in front of a computer every day. Even if there has been some case like that in the course of history, it's certainly not the norm, and to act like it is is very lazy in itself.

Now, then. This woman all of a sudden decides she wants government benefits -- and she can't get them. And another guy, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, wrote a USA TODAY story three weeks ago about how he can't get benefits because he makes $960 a month freelance writing (he lives in campgrounds). An acquaintance of mine recently told me he is no longer a Libertarian because he sees how corporations can squeeze the little guy, and there needs to be more control. He recently lost his job.

My question is, why do people have to lose their jobs to suddenly realize that you can become poor or need to depend on the govt. without it being your fault? Can't people ever look beyond their own experience? When folks were doing fine, couldn't they have imagined that there were OTHER people who involuntarily lost jobs, became mentally ill, or had some other problem that made them depend on benefits?

So the nouveau poor are mad at the gov't. But you know, I'd have more sympathy for someone who's homeless and mentally ill than someone who was making a decent salary at a dot-com and didn't have the foresight to put money in a savings account. Yet, what I just said isn't fair, either -- it makes an assumption that people who are unemployed or poor right now were lazy or stupid about their money. And probably, most of them weren't.

Here's my point. Don't decide your political views based on your own narrow experience. Don't make assumptions about the world unless you really look at it. Don't do what's easiest.

Conservatives got angry recently when they saw that the University of North Carolina was requiring incoming freshmen to read and discuss Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Nickel and Dimed," about trying to get by on minimum wage. The book is non-fiction. It probably does have a liberal bent, but it's about the way the world really works. It's not fantasy stories about crack mothers with twelve kids. What were they afraid of - people finding out that poverty sucks?