Paul Sassone

“Where’s my free cheese?”

A few years back I was assigned a story on the distribution of government surplus cheese to people deemed by the government to live in poverty.

The cheese came in bricks. It wasn’t yellow. It wasn’t white. It didn’t have much flavor.

But the recipients were glad to get it.

Food is food when your children are crying from hunger.

And the recipients didn’t begrudge others receiving free cheese or argue they deserved more cheese than the next person.

But someone did.

I knew a woman who was married to a wealthy downtown Chicago lawyer.

They had two cars, a large house in an exclusive suburb and a summer home in Wisconsin.

In conversation one afternoon I mentioned to her how I had covered the doling out of surplus cheese to poor families.

To which, she replied, “Where’s my free cheese?”

Now, I had tasted that government surplus cheese. And I knew this woman wouldn’t have touched that cheese with tongs.

She didn’t really want that government surplus cheese for herself and her husband.

She just didn’t want anyone to receive surplus cheese.

These people were getting something for nothing. And they shouldn’t.

If these people are hungry they should work for their food (just as her husband the lawyer works).

“Where is my free cheese?”

I never forgot what she said, or the self-absorption behind those words.

It seems to me that the emotional arc of Americans has swung to her side. It seems to me that more and more of us are asking, “Where is my free cheese?”

Watch the news. Read the papers. All government programs that breathe any altruism at all — any help for the poor, the elderly, the infirm, the vulnerable — is being slashed.

Not needed.

They don’t work.

I want mine.

“Where is my free cheese?”

–More are asking: ‘Where is my  free cheese?’–