I've worked with people; i.e., the professionals, the educated, the ones running for-profit and non-profit and government agencies like Department of Human Services, Veterans Administration, Aging and Disabilities - who blame psychological fissures in the individual's life, that is, choices. These middlemen and middlewomen (gatekeepers) might look at an adult's formative years dealing with family circumstances like neglect - both emotional/spiritual and physical/nutritional/educational - for some measure of that person's continual trials and tribulations and Herculean efforts to overcome a felony (the professional rarely asks why a person was even pulled into the criminal injustice system in the first place). These young and old "clients" continually have to face one bad debt after another bad eviction, or are living life with chronic pain, illness(-es) and substance(s) abuse, and end up in this vicious American PayDay Loan Mafioso system of trying to make ends meet. Sometimes three shitty jobs, just to pay the rent and put slop on the table and maintain that albatross around many of our necks - personal vehicles to get to work.
The typical social worker or social services manager will not yell at the client, but these Nurse Ratched's and Dr. Jekyl's are burning inside with recriminations, with retributive zealotry, with ideas of who is worthy and who isn't, even holding bizarre ideas about the size of the client's brain and the content of his or her character. It is an AA world where the person - who is only a victim to himself or herself, these middling social services people believe - has to give himself or herself up to a higher authority: . . . the god of western medicine/ psychology/ counseling/education/ probationary/criminal/ penal systems.
There is no radical social worker bone in the American practitioner, who is just in it for the ladder climbing, or in the case of state/county/federal employees, in it for the benefits and paid time off. The amount of time, money and effort expended and blood-sweat-and-tears from clients' perspective is out of control, misplaced and misdirected.
Here is the big lie and self-delusion in a nutshell: For homeless veterans in Portland, Oregon, it's their fault for having thousands of dollars of unpaid fines (and the PayDay loan collection agencies cities and counties hire to do their dirty work) for such things as not having a $5 ticket for the local metro (fines go up to $200 or more for not showing up to court for a five f*cking dollar missing bus/metro ticket), or their fault for sleeping in a park and getting caught by the cops, or their fault for panhandling and getting cited, or their own fault for kibitzing in their van with expired tags and plates and having to pay $2500 in court fees/fines, or their fault for having a shitty bladder and urinating in the bushes and getting put into the system as a sex offender (exposure of genitalia), or their goddamned fault for having a hunting knife in a backpack while going into a public library and having their wrists zip tied with a phalanx of cops yelling at them with guns drawn.
Social workers pointing the finger of Fault at the clients, who now when they enter any system of social work oppression and repression have several dozen scarlet A's on their chests. It's their fault for growing up in Portland, getting into the Army for two years, and for not making it the grand career that General Powell or Swartzkopf made it; and then coming back here to continue with their broken lives (their fault, completely, for the "brokenness").
Their fault for not doing well in high school, their fault for not going to college, their fault for not getting a career from the military. Their fault that the mother of their children left and their fault for not paying child support. It's their fault for smoking, not eating right, for drinking and for getting hooked on opioids. It's their fault for not taking care of their teeth, and their fault for not going to the doctor enough.
Now, you can expect this sh*t from a Donald p*ssy Grabber Trump or Bill "Monica-Cigar" Clinton or Bill "blacks are the blame for their own circumstances" Cosby or Mitt "Forty Percent Live Off the Public Trough" Romney or Hillary "Super Predator" Clinton. However, you'd think that with all the millions working in social services and the attendant side jobs tied to the social services network and then all the supervisors making decent wages in social work, with their undergraduate and graduate degrees from supposedly institutions of higher learning, this sort of crap would be verboten.
On the contrary. I can't get into not only serious conversations about the causes of these circumstances homeless veterans find themselves in, but definitely I can't get takers to discuss the systemic failures of social services and any social welfare "system" in a neoliberal or just plain Jane For-Profit-at-Any-Costs Capitalistic system.
Imagine, the economic draft that brings tens of thousands of new faces into the various branches of the military. Think of the ongoing denigration of education, of knowledge for knowledge sake, and the continual attacks to the force of what deep and thoughtful reading of books might do to a human. Think of the constant drum beat of this society vaunting cops, detectives, prosecutors, FBI, CIA, generals and officers, and the Navy SEAL, Army Airborne Ranger, Hotshot Air Force Jet Jockey, Massively Impressive Navy Submariner/fleet commander, the wickedly gruesome might of the Marine, and we have a society that has the entire equation inverted, dripping with nationalism, patriotism and fascism.
Blame the guy or gal for joining up? Most of the men and women I have served who served in the armed forces are broken from the training, the reckless machismo of kill-kill-kill, the horrible training, the idiotic lack of kinesiology for the things they want inductees to do.
I have a 55-year-old former Airborne parachute jumper, who happens to be a female African American, now up for double hip replacement because of the 200-pound rucksack she had to strap on while jumping out of a plane, with her five-five 120-pound frame.
Yet, the average social services person looks over that, and wonders how she ended up homeless, with a 21-year-old son who has his own knee issues from football. Living in a shelter, yet the reasons for their admittance are deep, complicated, and endemic of a broken system that wants more fodder for the pimping that goes with the social services game.
Blame, blame, blame the oppressed. Find some Puritanical angle to foist onto a client. Serve the mythological bullshit that anyone in America can make it, and anyone just has to pull himself/herself up by the bootstraps.
The elite believe this, you know, everyone from Hollydirt star, to two-bit local newscaster; from pigs like Wilbur Ross, to Betsy Devos; from Oprah to Michelle; from Norman Vincent Peale to Billy Graham; from one CEO to the next. Gates, Musk, Bezos, Bloomberg, Peyton Manning, James Beard, Martha Stewart, Trump to the Fourth Power, and on and on.
Add to this list the managers of Child Protective Services, or the foster care system, or VA mental health services, or education districts. From city council member to the local Chamber of Commerce yokel, to Scout leader, to restaurant owner.
The systems I have worked for made it clear who was under who, and the Human Resources (HR) and Development and Leadership and Creative wonks looked at the clients as marks and the direct service providers, social workers, et al, as the cannon fodder to keep the social services Fiefdom running.
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