Social workers are trained in how to relate to people, to recognize and deal with social and psychological problems AND they also have to know what public services are available to people and help them navigate the tangle of government bureaucracies. I would guess most of them are sincerely committed to helping people, and most of them also have more cases than they can handle well.
This study or report -- whatever it was -- noted that some social workers had an impact upon the families they served that acted almost like a narcotic. The social workers "hooked" these families on welfare, state-sponsored educational programs, "FREE" this, "FREE" that -- all the stuff that's available to the poor and needy. Often this aid never resulted in the family freeing itself from public welfare; it only taught them how to use the system more effectively to get what they need from the state. It was creating a "perennial underclass."
This report was a private document. It was supposed to be kept under wraps and circulated only to certain people. I managed to verify the fact that it did exist, however. And in one rather embarrassing incident, I asked a lady who held a managerial position at DCFS if she'd ever read this report. Her eyes shot flames as she demanded, "How did you find out about that?"
Well, both Patrick Moynihan, once a US senator from New York, and Charles Murray, a social researcher and author, have written about exactly the same thing: the negative impacts of welfare and other public aid programs. Moynihan had been a staunch supporter for federal programs like ADC (Aid to Dependent Children) and similar, until the statistics began to come in after a decade or so of destruction. He remained a liberal, but was honest about admitting the errors in these programs and their terrible social consequences: the creation of a perennial underclass.
At about this same time, a documentary -- probably on PBS, though I really don't remember -- featured a young woman who had a couple kids, no husband, living on welfare and with her mother. Interesting. This woman seemed to be a vocational program junkie. She'd take one course after another at state expense, pass the course, but she never seemed to be able to get a job. She might work for a week or two, then would turn up on welfare again, volunteering for another vocational program. She also managed to get carfare out of the state so she could get to her classes, childcare, healthcare for herself and her children, paid rent, etc etc etc. She just never seemed to be able to keep job.
The documentarians were illustrating the point that what this woman had learned was how to milk the system. How to stay on welfare. What kind of excuses for her failures were acceptable. How much she could get for which services the state was willing to render. What classes she could take, etc. etc. She learned all that, but virtually nothing about how to live as an independent person in a free society. She never even learned why that might be a "good" idea.
I worked with a woman with a couple young kids in a similar situation. She was divorced and her husband wasn't around and/or willing to keep up with anything like child support. She couldn't have lived off of that, anyway. So she was on welfare for a few years. When both of her kids were old enough to be in school all day, she started looking around for a job.
OK, now here's the problem. She too was getting a "full range" of benefits from the state. This included food stamps, paid rent, vocational training, healthcare for herself and her kids. When she started looking for a job, she had a hard time finding a position at her skill level and with her limited work experience, and which offered enough income and benefits to sustain her lifestyle. No, she wasn't living particularly large on welfare, but few private companies will provide the same social services as the government does.
She opted to take a job, with lower income for herself at first, but she worked her way up, too. But for her, the transition was like jumping off a cliff -- and she had to ensure that her kids would be taken care of.
A lot of people never make the transition. From their social workers, they learn how to work the system, and apparently they believe that's all they need to know. Ever.
And what do their kids learn? The same thing. Or at least the girls do. They often end up with their own kids before they finish high school, and deadbeat dads who never signed up for quite this kind of self-responsibility at the age of 15 or 16. And, with government serving as daddy and bread-winner, the boys are free to go out and terrorize each other as well as unsuspecting citizens. They learn that crime pays better than legitimate effort, at least until they get caught and go to jail. So the beat goes on....
To his credit, President Clinton helped to put an end to this never-ending cycle of generational dependency and victimization, but it seems that the current government is trying to undo all of that now. It seems that the current government is trying to put the middle class on welfare for one reason or another with socialized medicine, "FREE" housing, and so on. Huh... wonder why.
Let me assure you, too, that this isn't a racial assault. Most of the people I've ever known who were ever on welfare were white. That woman with the two kids who chose to jump off the cliff and take a job in the private sector was a co-worker, and she was black.
What amazes me about this whole thing is how quickly the public forgets the bitter lessons the nation has suffered -- and continues to suffer -- from the "good" intentions of misguided busybodies.
Let's look globally for a moment. In college, I had a political science professor who was genuinely brilliant. He was born and raised outside the US and only came here to attend the University of Chicago.
We had a course on terrorism, where every student had to pick a trouble spot somewhere in the world and research it, try to understand the forces at work, and suggest some kind of solution. We students were a little short on solutions..... hard enough to just find out who stole who's pig first to start the conflict. Most times, it didn't really matter. All sides involved in the conflict just grew up hating the other guys. That was all the "reason" they needed to sustain their wars.
Anyway, Palestine was one trouble spot. At the time, there was no nation of Palestine. Palestine was a geographic region that had been a British protectorate. A remnant of imperialism. Palestinians were primarily islamics who fled Israel when it was made an independent nation in 1947, after World War II. They didn't have to leave, they just decided to. While Israel is officially a Jewish state, it tolerates other religions and religious practices.
I was in school roughly 35 years after Israel had been created. And our professor pointed out that these Palestinian refugees were still huddling around the borders of Israel, complaining about A) being disenfranchised; B) being ragged and poor; C) having no homeland of their own.
And at this time, they were finding a voice: Yassir Arafat. He seemed concerned about the misery of his constituents. He didn't seem concerned enough to help them do anything about it, though, except slaughter Jews. Like that would be a positive step toward the Palestinians' economic and political progress.
Meanwhile, the Jews were turning Israel into a productive and free democratic nation.
Thirty-five years sitting on the border and whining? That in itself would seem to take considerable effort -- thwarting the perfectly acceptable and altogether natural impulse to produce something to better yourself and improve your situation. But Arafat and apparently other Palestinian leaders had a vested interest in keeping those people ragged and poor and raging at their fates. They provided Arafat with a political base, a constituency. Arafat turned them into terrorists.
If you don't have a reasonable argument, kill the opposition. That works. It really does. Wouldn't be my first choice, but violence and terror are, after all, sure-fire ways to get other people to do what you want them to do. History is littered with examples.
But God, this is disgusting. It goes back to power and victims. Some butthead effectively enslaving people, cheering them along to maintain their own oppression and helplessness so that he can boss them around and become their Leader. I always thought this was some kind of sociopathy, where you don't care about what you do to other people, as long as you get yours. I'm beginning to think it's what makes politics an attractive career for many people.
Liberals are fond of claiming that liberal thought is much more subtle and complex than conservative ideas. Actually, I think liberal thought is just jam-packed with convoluted fallacious rationalizations to help liberals keep on believing that what they're doing is good for anyone. At best, they're trying to salve their own bizarre sense of guilt that they may be better off than some other people. At worst, they're ruthlessly power-hungry and hoping to establish a constituency they can manipulate. Like Ol' Massa' on the antebellum plantation.
Either way, guess who pays for it -- and in much more than dollars and cents.
A couple quotes from Karl Marx:
1) The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
2) The quickest way to a man's head is through his stomach.
I always kinda liked Reverend Ike a whole lot better. He used to say, "Give a man a fish, he'll be back next week looking for another handout. But to teach a man to fish, and you set him free."
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