The demise of America found in a single computer glitch

In case you missed the news over the weekend, a small software glitch temporarily halted the use of food stamps debit cards. Predictably, people lost their minds.

The federal food stamps program is officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). By its very name, it's clearly not meant to be an entire livelihood, but a supplemental source -- something that is added to something else in order to make it complete.  But if people were actually treating SNAP as a supplemental source of funding for food, I wouldn't think they'd react in this way.

In Mississippi, a "mini riot".  In Louisiana, local police were called in.  In states across the country, people were fighting and clambering over one another because EBT cards couldn't be used for about 10 hours.  TEN HOURS.  Not 10 days.  Not even half of a single day.  It's not like these people were on the verge of starvation.  In fact, I'd venture to bet that most of them weren't even moderately hungry.

Whenever I see commercials on TheBlaze for Food Insurance, it's easy to ignore them and assume natural disasters or other emergencies couldn't possibly happen in my neighborhood.  But after this weekend, the message in my mind has shifted: Forget terrorist attacks and nuclear armageddon -- be prepared for the next time people can't use their EBT cards.

Over at Ace of Spades, Monty has more insight on this weekend's false alarm:

This to me is probably the most important DOOM-related story that I've seen so far this year. Why? Because it illustrates how deep our pathologies run, and how maddeningly difficult -- maybe impossible -- it will be to find a political solution. [...]

...It's not a matter of politics, or willpower, or kindness towards our fellow man, or abstract economic principles. The way we live now is a simple violation of physics. We are consuming far more than we produce, as a nation. Our value-add shrinks, year by year, even as the demands on the public treasury keep growing. Our productive population keeps shrinking while the ranks of the wards of the state grow.

Meanwhile the citizenry, who are supposedly the masters of their own destiny in this two-century old Republic, almost riot when they can't buy their government-subsidized crackers and Cheez Whiz.

Generosity often breeds contempt and not gratitude in the recipient. That's been true for the entirety of human history. Yet somehow it always takes us by surprise when we see it.

People used to laugh and roll their eyes when I told them that a second Civil War was becoming all but inevitable in this country. They don't laugh any more.