What does ‘emergency’ mean?

This letter arrived in response to the article, “Welfare vanishes as poverty soars,” published in the Feb. 12 issue of Workers World.

My daughter, Aurora, lives in Albuquerque, N.M. She has two children, and since her companion lost his job as a chef at Marriot, she/they are fairly destitute. She works on call as a home health care aide.

Aurora was in New York for Christmas and was good enough to spend all of her food stamp allotment on us (turkey for Christmas and trimmings). When she got back to New Mexico, she found that she had missed the deadline for emergency food stamps—by a day. I said, “How can there be an emergency deadline? If you need food, you need it and your children need it? How can they have you wait? You could starve!”

It was the same thing with TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families]; miss an emergency deadline and wait for two or three weeks for help—the little that you get!

I guess Clinton changed the meaning of a simple word. You would have thought it a non-negotiable word: emergency!