Working the System?
For a “story a reporter can’t tell,” would you believe there is, in the District of Columbia, a 37-year-old woman, both of her children school-aged, herself able-bodied enough to organize block parties and neighborhood meetings, who can bellyache about gentrification but who hasn’t the gumption to find even a minimum-wage jobwhich, at 140 hours a month, would double the “monthly welfare check of $379” she calls her only source of income and which would render moot her need for the government to pay 70 percent of her housing costs?
Whatever is keeping Sertira Wilson on “welfare” has escaped the attention of writer Laura Lang (“Home Advantage,” 11/24). But surely that, above all, is on every reader’s mind: Why is Wilson on the sidelines, in times of low, low, low unemployment, trying to take control of her life through every means except the obvious one?
Shaw