So that's the rub, really - the lack of conscientious and deliberate work we the bottom 80 percent of society continue to flounder under, leading to the systemic failures working within the echo chamber and chamber of horrors that define Predatory Capitalism.
Imagine the anguish daily of most of us living in this system of oppression, but add to that the military service members who are homeless, broken, and used up and then told by so-called social services workers that it's all on them, all their fault, only the result of bad personal decisions and flawed mental and psychological states.
Oppressors and the oppressed. And, the defining qualities of evil when its face is not Charles Manson or Henry Kissinger or the Green River Killer.
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power; cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to "soften" the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this.
In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity" which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life" to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands - whether of individuals or entire peoples - need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.
Paulo Freire continues in his deep study of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking at the oppressor as the oppressed, and he talks a lot about freedom and liberation from this oppressed and oppressor relationship. In a nutshell, the veterans I worked with at the Salvation/Starvation Army are the oppressed, but they have all internalized the oppressors' image. The oppressors are the directorship, the chaplains and officers of the salvation army, the staff and more fearsome the social services practitioners. They have adopted the oppressors' guidelines and rules, and daily now, I get phone calls and emails from former clients who are truly fearful of freedom even though they dread daily living at a homeless center where they are always under the gun, under the microscope and under the thumb of an arbitrary and capricious director who believes in exacting a pound of flesh through Jesus and her own failure as a human who supposedly went through her own recovery.
Freire again: Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
That completion is a tough one to sell in a society where the men and women of uniform went in believing for the most part the historical lies of patriotism, and the red, white and blue myths invented by the oppressors to keep the oppressed off kilter and willing subjects in this massive propaganda-fueled system of war as the ultimate racket.
The very existence of these borders, the US of A, defines oppression on a massive continental scale, with tentacles that reach globally. Anyone falling prey to the rot of patriotism and the systemic violence of military servitude is both the oppressor and oppressed. Most men and women I have worked with that are deemed homeless veterans know inherently they were in a screwed up system, but many still hold onto the ideals of a brotherhood-sisterhood in their service, even though they have little or no respect for the senior NCOs and officers that wielded insanely warped amounts of power that allowed them to force humans to do the most inhumane things, what can only be declared as evil.
The evil doers are the ones that maintain that a country's massive disproportionate response to a perceived or manufactured threat, or even its first firing of the war cannons without any perceived or manufactured threat is righteous in maintaining a balance in the world they see as us versus them. So George W. Bush's "evil-doers" refrain was that of the mirroring image of the evil doer, as America is both oppressor and oppressed, all wrapped up in a schizophrenic bow.
Imagine a superstitious and spiritually warped people, coming here from Europe to exploit and create the first corporations of oppression, not knowing what it is to be one for the masses, collectively for all peoples, especially those whose ancestral lands they ended up despoiling and stealing. Easily, the white race sees everyone else - even those in its white community - as un-people, worse than calling them "the other." Unpeople are bug slat to use the terminology of the drone masters of the US military. Splat that is worthy of double- or triple-taps of the missiles and high caliber automatic guns from their white people's drones.
So goes the oppressed social worker, who then learns the rules of oppression to be the oppressor no matter how small or insignificant he or she is in the scheme of things, and the result is callousness, and the power of holding someone weaker in the sites of all systems of sniping that is called social services bureaucracy. I have witnessed a certain minute-to-minute meanness and pettiness that go beyond dishonesty and insubordination of the ethics of social work. At the Starvation Army, where I worked, and where others who are living there continue to report to me about, the level of harm and triggering and goading and retaliation and downright racism and prejudice against ailing men with drug histories is at a level of systemic failure. The veterans and I have reported these levels of unethical, unprincipled intentional harm to the powers that be, but to no avail. Read here:
How the Salvation Army Lives Off (and thrives with) a Special Brand of Poverty Pimping
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