No new big ideas, and gutless leadership who shrivel up in the face of a political fight or funders' battle. The entire system is rotting from the top, down. There are no great leaders or thinkers or doers. Money talks, and so Intel or Nike or Starbucks or any number of Fortune 1000 outfits direct where funding and grants and donations go. We are not working to emancipate and derive freedom as people willing to break the chains of oppression and fulfill the role of the oppressed. Individual freedom and collective consciousness are not in the toolbox of the oppressors in the social services industry:
A free action can only be one by which a man changes his world and himself" A positive condition of freedom is the knowledge of the limits of necessity, the awareness of human creative possibilities . . . The struggle for a free society is not a struggle for a free society unless through it an ever greater degree of individual freedom is created.
- Gajo Petrovic, "Man and Freedom," in SocialistHumanism, edited by Erich Fromm (New York, 1965), pp. 274-276.
We are not at the tables of power, that is, the frontline people doing the work and being with the people are not in the backrooms at state capitols, nor the clients-patients-students-victims drawing up the evidence necessary to transform society in those committee meetings and boardrooms. We have become the precarious in this one-paycheck-away-from-the-poor-house society, and the evil dislocation of humanity that has been taught in schools, K12, and through the psychologically chilling mass media from cradle to grave is spliced to our genes. Social workers who have little control in their own lives, many of whom are drawn and quartered by fake fealty to the LGBTQQIAAP community, get the entire thing "inverted" and promulgate the brokenness of a broken system..
Really, I have former co-workers in this homeless shelter for veterans despising men, despising these cisgender males, both white and black, and yet, countless hours are spent on the potential transgender person getting into this facility.
Female social workers making $17 an hour for the Starvation Army decrying male chauvinism, decrying the "harsh societal treatment of non-cisgender conforming people."
So, the people I work with never-ever attack the system of oppression and control that is Social Work 101 - mind control, social hierarchical control, economic control, and the control of future generations (the children of the people we "serve"). They go on and on with LGBTQQIAAP rights and discussions, while mocking the split halves of the veteran-now-a-civilian who is at the whim of hundreds of systems of oppression, including the lowly social worker/case manager. Imagine, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, allies, asexual, pansexual - LGBTQQIAAP - as the issue of the day while we have veterans one more closed bureaucratic door closer to suicide!
Imagine these conversations, always hushed since the Starvation Army doesn't recognize same sex marriage, let alone the alphabet soup of LGBTQQIAAP of these Little Eichmann's or Little Nurse Ratched's. Imagine how many times I have had to confront Little Nurse Ratched's going after a loud black American veteran male for voicing his concerns with his poor treatment by the systems of oppression, or some angry white male complaining about the bad food and the forced UAs and breath analyzers for people who have never ever had a substance abuse issue.
I was hit with two hostile work environment warnings from the hyper- Christian and massively triggering director who stated one of the LGBTQQIAAP adherent social workers felt my email rebutting some stupid policy she foisted, or for raising my voice at her in a hallway felt that my male white patriarchy was threatening her. Of course, the LGBTQQIAAP case manager never really stated "male white patriarchy" because her boss is one son-of-a-gun white male patriarchy Trump et al loving "little girl" (she's pushing 58 years old and refers to herself as "my man's little girl") who calls her significant other "Big Daddy."
It's so absurd it sounds like I am making this sh*t up.
Yet, these colonized women, again, one or two missed paychecks away from eviction (oh, but these women I worked with have moneyed parents, so, that might not be true) have zero interest in mounting a front of righteous indignation through a concerted grievance process or to go whistleblower to stop this viscous and unconscionable treatment against veterans of color and male veterans who do not go quietly into the night. Instead, yours truly make the powers that be and their minions/sycophants uncomfortable, hence the "hostile work environment" canard.
Social welfare in any society has two major priorities or purposes: social treatment and social control. Since the inception of social work, American values have social welfare paradigms, goals and expectations of recipients of social welfare, and have directed the agent of change (e.g., individual vs structural) as well. These values and paradigms are shaped largely, by those in power, creating a standard, or norm, that is not applicable across groups, creating contradictions between values and practice. In the United States, a White, middle-class majority has shaped societal goals and expectations for its members since the beginning of its formation, with social workers functioning as brokers, advocates, and assemblers. Society, thus grants social workers permission to, --force marginalized, deviant, and vulnerable clients to conform-- Since the beginning of the conquest and settlement of North America, Native Americans have been the target of policies and practices at the hands of the "State" (i.e., United States government) that utilize methods of social control.
Again, veterans who mostly come from the disenfranchised families or structurally economically deprived sub-communities of this "melting pot" are being "treated" by mostly cisgender women whose lives are cemented in White Middle Class mores and values, even though now, this millennial wave of workers is seeing their futures as less economically forward reaching as their parents' lives were. White middle class privilege waning makes for a messy mess against those disenfranchised and underprivileged people these young and old women and men now hold sway over! A dangerous combination.
Radical Social Work? Oxymoron in America!
By the early seventies, while social work was under a lot of criticism from the political right about lack of efficiency and effectiveness, on the political left concern grew about the effects this approach to social work had. Social problems became individualized and the structural causes behind somebody's problems disappeared out of view. By encapsulating social work into the direct relationship between service provider and client, the focus quickly came to lie on the client's own responsibilities and what he or she could do to reduce the problems being faced. Features of society that caused social problems remained hidden and were not addressed in an attempt to improve social quality. In that sense, social work became a partner in crime in the culture of silence around social justice (see the work of Paolo Freire).
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