Oh - jeez - now what
Oct. 26th, 2003 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyburgLooks like a news story jumped out and bit ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
unclejimbo on the nose. I don't want to remind him of similar stories nearer to home - like the woman arrested in Temecula who had three children, and a massive meth jones. She ended up with a dead baby when it OD'd on the methamphetamine in her breast milk.
Another story in Gardena earlier this summer was an 11-year old girl who came out to her counselor at school, saying "I just can't live like this anymore." At home were four adopted children in addition to her three biological siblings - all starving and beaten.
The difference between conservative and liberal. Conservatives largely believe that the human condition is evil and unchangeable - liberals believe that the human condition is improvable, with effort and support. A conservative is comfortable only with conformity. A liberal questions that conformity.
Conservatives don't believe throwing money at problems like these help any. Not to sound like a case-study liberal, but nothing else has ever been proved to prevent them.
Take a gander at this story. I'm reminded of the television documentary that was done in 1968 (and we were still seeing in classrooms when I was a sophomore in college in 1979), called "Hunger in America." I remember how surprised I was to find that people older, and allegedly smarter than me, were feeding infants a steady supply of sugar water and not much else. Then, it was due to poverty.
Now - convenience? Is it then more true that we are poor while we work every spare minute of the day? I plead for understanding of how this thinking works.
I want to see it coming.
Hold people accountable. Oh, absolutely. The parents, and every last person responsible for their care and protection. That includes overloaded caseworkers, their supervisors and everyone on that food chain. A kid dies on your watch, you don't lose your job - you get tried for murder. All of you.
But threatening violence does nothing. Further isolating families by turning away, does nothing. They don't need money - but they need the things money buys. Like education and support. In the end, you may only end up with a parent who can be a better parent. They may never leave the system. This has to be accepted as a given.
Think of how damaged a person who has never had a decent meal can be at 19. No amount of Christmas baskets, food stamps, section 8 housing - none of that - can overcome poor nutrition while a child is building brain cells. That's up to age 9 or so. You have someone who can't possibly be expected to function at the level of a normal adult - hence, you have someone who must function outside of the norm to survive.
Drugs, crime, violence - all of the above. We incarcerate more people in this country per capita than any other industrialized nation - and the newest figures show most of them are mentally ill and not getting any better in jail.
President Carter was the one who said if we could eliminate child abuse for one generation - just one - we would eliminate the need for most of the penal systems and welfare programs we have.
Imagine a world where for one generation, nobody abuses a child. Could you imagine the outrage when it did occur after that?
Child abuse is a function of societal stressors, personal stressors, personal experience (or lack of it) and just sheer incompetence. You can measure the potential for it just by studying what kinds of stress a society falls under. It isn't a race thing, a religious thing, a city thing, a rural thing - an American thing, a whatever thing. It's stupidity, anger, ignorance and apathy. It breeds in poverty.
It's not going to go away. Certainly not with arrogance and indifference.
I don't have all the answers - I'm just certain I can't do it all myself. And I'm finding it harder and harder to find support.
unclejimbo on the nose. I don't want to remind him of similar stories nearer to home - like the woman arrested in Temecula who had three children, and a massive meth jones. She ended up with a dead baby when it OD'd on the methamphetamine in her breast milk.Another story in Gardena earlier this summer was an 11-year old girl who came out to her counselor at school, saying "I just can't live like this anymore." At home were four adopted children in addition to her three biological siblings - all starving and beaten.
The difference between conservative and liberal. Conservatives largely believe that the human condition is evil and unchangeable - liberals believe that the human condition is improvable, with effort and support. A conservative is comfortable only with conformity. A liberal questions that conformity.
Conservatives don't believe throwing money at problems like these help any. Not to sound like a case-study liberal, but nothing else has ever been proved to prevent them.
Take a gander at this story. I'm reminded of the television documentary that was done in 1968 (and we were still seeing in classrooms when I was a sophomore in college in 1979), called "Hunger in America." I remember how surprised I was to find that people older, and allegedly smarter than me, were feeding infants a steady supply of sugar water and not much else. Then, it was due to poverty.
Now - convenience? Is it then more true that we are poor while we work every spare minute of the day? I plead for understanding of how this thinking works.
I want to see it coming.
Hold people accountable. Oh, absolutely. The parents, and every last person responsible for their care and protection. That includes overloaded caseworkers, their supervisors and everyone on that food chain. A kid dies on your watch, you don't lose your job - you get tried for murder. All of you.
But threatening violence does nothing. Further isolating families by turning away, does nothing. They don't need money - but they need the things money buys. Like education and support. In the end, you may only end up with a parent who can be a better parent. They may never leave the system. This has to be accepted as a given.
Think of how damaged a person who has never had a decent meal can be at 19. No amount of Christmas baskets, food stamps, section 8 housing - none of that - can overcome poor nutrition while a child is building brain cells. That's up to age 9 or so. You have someone who can't possibly be expected to function at the level of a normal adult - hence, you have someone who must function outside of the norm to survive.
Drugs, crime, violence - all of the above. We incarcerate more people in this country per capita than any other industrialized nation - and the newest figures show most of them are mentally ill and not getting any better in jail.
President Carter was the one who said if we could eliminate child abuse for one generation - just one - we would eliminate the need for most of the penal systems and welfare programs we have.
Imagine a world where for one generation, nobody abuses a child. Could you imagine the outrage when it did occur after that?
Child abuse is a function of societal stressors, personal stressors, personal experience (or lack of it) and just sheer incompetence. You can measure the potential for it just by studying what kinds of stress a society falls under. It isn't a race thing, a religious thing, a city thing, a rural thing - an American thing, a whatever thing. It's stupidity, anger, ignorance and apathy. It breeds in poverty.
It's not going to go away. Certainly not with arrogance and indifference.
I don't have all the answers - I'm just certain I can't do it all myself. And I'm finding it harder and harder to find support.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-10-26 02:57 pm (UTC)More than once, I witnessed parents physically abusing their children.
Twice, I had to call the police because clients became unruly - once because a man was attacked for accidentally stepping in front of another, and once because people applying for "assistance" refused to leave, were being verbally abusive, and threatened us all multiple times.
So many of these people had one thing in common: They didn't want to change. They'd grown up on government money, they brought up their kids on government money, and they planned to die on government money. They didn't want to get smarter or to get better jobs. They didn't care if their kids were bruised or fat. They were self-centered, insisting that they were more important than everyone else - because that's what they were raised to believe. They believed that the government existed to provide everything they needed - food, money, shelter, warmth.
And it didn't stop with the clients. People working for the Department of Social Services were inept because they didn't want to fulfill their job duties. They didn't even care about the people who legitimately needed assistance, and about a quarter of the time they didn't bother to call in approved benefits. And the heating and power companies were almost as bad - they'd send people to our office to apply for help when the people obviously weren't in need of our services, and even continued to send people when the office was closed for the season. They sent people to us on holidays. And the people would get angry at us because, of course, we were the government office.
But, by spork, we were the only government office in existence that actually ran smoothly and fairly. There were just 4 of us - the director, 2 case workers, and me (I was front desk/administrative). The director called in every instance of child abuse, was the first to tell me when to call the cops, and kept all the benefits and the bullshitters in line.
But four people who know what they're doing can't truly counteract a broken system designed to support broken people.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-26 06:50 pm (UTC)The fact that people left that office angry does not bother me in the least. I assure you, I'm convinced people will use a lot of things besides money for currency, and bullying is just one of them. People will do what works - if yelling and screaming until people give you stuff to shut you up comes easier than keeping a job - well, guess what.
Good heavens. Nobody wants to change. It's terrifying. And in truth, you were dealing with folks who's only thought was to see what they could get out of you. Angry, mean, violent, whatever. That's what they knew. It hadn't been that long ago that someone had gotten their way with them much the same way.
You had folks who said no. Repeatedly. Good for them, and if you're not in that job anymore - no surprise. Trained professionals don't stay in that line of work.
No, little incentive to cooperate - little incentive to give a damn - no accountability if you did screw up or they screwed up. Just too damn much of it to give a damn about and nobody motivated to do so. That, I'd like to see some effort and bucks put towards changing.
You took care of the ones who needed help and got it. Shoot, talk to anyone doing tech support these days. You find the bullies everywhere you go - you want to put a stop to it, you don't cave. Do not feed the Trolls. Whatever.
People do rise to expectations - even if they hate every minute of it and balk every step of the way. As I said, if the only thing you can accomplish is keeping parents from killing their kids - I'm for it. But it's a dirty, expensive, labor-intensive job and never for the faint of heart or easily discouraged.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 10:15 am (UTC)The fact that there are a lot of the mentally ill in prisons or on the street isn't that big a surprise, the reason that they're there might be. There was an explosion in the growth of the mental health industry around the turn of the last century, and an actual surplus of sanitariums, "retreats," asylums, and the like, many of them free of charge, run by charitable organizations and churches. Unfortunately, psychology and psychoanalysis being in the formative stages they were, there was a lot of quackery afoot, but much of it was harmless, at the least it provided housing and food for the patients, and it was nonetheless easy for a person to get him or herself committed and at least have a place to sleep at night.
Unfortunately, there was a massive public outcry around the late 30's and 40's engendered by the worst of these institutions. The practice of surgical attempts to "solve" insanity (lobotomy, etc.) some of the most severe alternate treatments("sleep" therapy, hydrotherapy), and rumored cases of families "disappearing" unwanted relations by getting them committed. Newspaper stories hyped up the worst of the cases (which really were bad) and eventually enough politicians used it as stump-speech material that the government essentially took over. Suddenly, when taxpayer money was at stake, people were wanting justification for all the money spent, and corners started getting cut. People who really weren't capable of taking care of themselves were turned over to their relatives, or just turned out into the street. The call for "more humane treatment" in privately owned and operated sanitariums, engendered by mistreatment in the worst of them, thus resulted in thousands of people getting no treatment at all, and eventually dying on the street.
Ironically, it's much, much more difficult for a person to have themselves committed to a mental health hospital now than it was around the turn of last century.