Go Retire Psychiatrist

The other day Sena was shopping at the grocery store and she was standing in line at the checkout lane. An African American woman (age maybe thirtyish) was having trouble with her WIC card. That’s the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC for short) debit card. It’s the federal assistance program that provides food, nutrition education, breast feeding support and health care referrals for low-income pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and kids under the age of five years.

The woman was having trouble with swiping the card. The cashier, an African American man maybe at least a decade older than her, said he’d help her with it, got the card swiped and handed it back to her saying, “Here’s your WIC card back.”

The woman said “Don’t say that out loud.” He looked at her just long enough to suggest he wondered why she said that. It sounded like she might have been ashamed of it.

Back in the day, both my family and Sena’s family used what were then called food stamps, a kind of forerunner of the WIC program. We ran errands to the grocery store, which were not just a walk around the corner from our homes. We paid with food stamps. We didn’t know enough to be ashamed of it and the grocery store clerks didn’t make a big deal out of it either.

I blogged about an incident similar to this about three years ago, “Kindness is Still Out There.”

It was strange, but for the last several days I’d been thinking of a song I’d first heard when I was a kid, called “Love of the Common People.” I would get the lyrics wrong, like, “living in the love or the arms of the common people” and whatnot.

I finally looked it up on the web and discovered this was first recorded by a group called The Four Preps in 1967. It’s been covered numerous times by different artists, several of them multicultural. I don’t know which one I first heard or exactly when I heard it.

There’s a YouTube of a Waylon Jennings cover that has over 350,000 views and 85 comments. And there are reggae covers; maybe one of the best known by Nicky Thomas in 1970, which has 264,000 views and 99 comments. Sena and I like this one too. The first line of the song is “Living on free food tickets,” and a lot of people know what it means. Hey, nothing is free. And it’s about living in the everlasting arms of the common people.

This is not just about black or white people. The common people are everywhere and they’re a rainbow mix of people from many cultures.