Government Small Enough To Fit In Your Guts....

 (Trying to turn this into an op-ed about a SNAP fast-food ban kicking around AZ lege right now... as this is, it's probably too long.)

Since they have been so successful putting it in people’s panty drawers and so many other such places, I guess they want in our larders and our guts

When I started this piece, I was building up to a lecture, probably because the feelings that this topic brings up can be so uncomfortable.  So, yes, the banned-foods-on-SNAP conversation is about Free Will and Choice and how sometimes people who are struggling(which, at different times, for different reasons, includes many of us) seek out consolation prizes. There are things about the food system, too, and why things that seem like junk can be cheaper and easier to get than things that are fresh that more informed writers tackle every day, so, definitely find one of them instead of me about that, and I’ll try not to speculate about what mass-produced foodstuff excites Rep. Martinez’s own taste-buds, but most Americans have at least one, in my experience.She eats it, too, I'd bet anything I had.  

If I’m honest, for me this conversation starts with marshmallow fluff. In college, my roommate and I needed some for a recipe and didn’t have cash. None of that seemed as hard as it might have later because we were Getting Our Educations in the booming 1990s and everything would work out one way or another, even from our wheelchairs.As everyone said, “We have the ADA now,” and it’s still fun and novel to make things stretch and stuff. Just learning *so much* every day.  So I make my purchase and talk to the clerk about the weather or my weekend or whatever, which is fine, but I’m still slower than most of the other people with one item so a knot of shoppers starts to collect behind me.

If I’d been a target of a group eye-roll before, I’d been too wrapped up in what I was doing, possibly while talking, to notice fully, but that time, I still remember how my skin burned under so many “Oh, man, here we go!” faces.  I remember being torn between full-on shame and the kind of defiance that made me want to blurt out something like “Okay, you got me.  I broke my brain eating nothing but marshmallow fluff so you assholes would have to support me FOREVER.  That was my incredibly evil, short-sighted plan.”(Evil laugh optional)

But, you know, some people would laugh or feel chastened as I might want, but it would only take one thinking “Wow, she just sits there and admits it,” to make me regret that, even in an era right before “going viral” was for anything but actual viruses.

I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if I said it, because obviously, as  House Democrats discover every week, keeping my powder dry did not lessen the pain at all.   Nor was it supplanted by my eventual, well-funded awesomeness.