Welfare Reform

The Times’ March 6 article on Julie Pearl and the “nearly 20 years . . . raising five children” on a welfare check once again puts the entire blame on women. When are the men going to be held accountable, tracked down and either made to pay or go to jail? Pearl did not impregnate herself, nor did thousands of other women. The men are allowed to leave or hang around to split the welfare dole.

It will take men to find men responsible, rather than conveniently blame each and every pregnancy on poor and/or illiterate women. It is easy to cut off women from help through the new “contract” rather than men taking responsibility! When are women going to get a fair deal?

D. GAYLE BOSTWICK

Palm Desert

* Re “A Way to Reinvent Citizenship,” Commentary, March 5:

Elliot Stern Jr. says that, since government can’t solve social problems and the private sector is structured to profit, that nonprofit ventures should be assigned the responsibility for what we normally call charitable work, such as caring for the sick, the deprived, the homeless and so on.

Stern aims at good purposes, but there is an easier way: Just enact a “charity tax” to support those purposes, but exempt anyone who doesn’t want to pay it. It could be called IDGAD, and would pass the charity burden along to the suckers, leaving anyone who says “I Don’t Give a Damn” free to pursue power or profit, depending on his bent toward government or the private sector.

RICHARD C. FARRELL

North Hills

* Obviously letter writer Randy Baca (March 2) has never been “underprivileged,” as he characterized the recipients of the school lunch program. If he had been, he would not make such a simplistic statement as “the struggle will build their character and give them wisdom.” When you are hungry and your family is subsisting on $40 a week in groceries, you don’t give much thought to character development. You just want a hot meal so that you can concentrate on your studies.

I am 25 and was a beneficiary of the school lunch and breakfast programs through my primary education. I was grateful that I could count on at least two meals every day. And, yes, I believe that I am a person of strong character, but I didn’t have to go without meals to achieve that. Being hungry doesn’t give character or wisdom, only hunger pangs.

QUETTA DENNIS

Los Angeles

* I really want to thank Peter King for his column “A Story of the Season” (Feb. 26), about the welfare mother who died trying to save the lives of her children in a fire. I’m so awfully tired of the meanness that seems to keep growing in our society--the selfishness and lack of compassion and sympathy for the most common of human emotions: survival, love of life, a mother’s selfless love of her children. And it goes on and on; it comes from everywhere--staring with the House of Representatives.

There has to be a turning point sometime soon. We need more compassion, more understanding and perhaps a little more sarcasm, of the sort King uses.

HEATHER SMITH

Fountain Valley