Anya Groner: The Heart You Save Won’t Be Your Own
guernicamag.com
guernicamag.com
This brought back memories.
Part of my first 'job' (minimum wage program for at-risk youth) was pickup / delivery and otherwise making use of donations to various county programs.
People were incredibly indignant about who might receive some benefit from stuff that was often just a step above garbage. It wasn't even a matter of TV, just seeing people living in something above total squalor (battered women sleeping on 'beds' made out of doors and 2x4s in a converted toolshed - how luxurious) pissed people off.
>'Gray computer monitors lined one wall.'
Memories here too.
For every 20 machines to come through the door we could piece together one capable of running the GED training app at the heart of our computer lab.
>'When I decided to quit, friends told me that the end of idealism is the beginning of awareness, that awareness is power, even when it shuts you down.'
I think so.
Armchair idealists, who lack the conviction of the active or the awareness of the defeated can be quite a pain as they deal exclusively in 'should'. Should doesn't feed anyone, but does work to disempower those who do.
This is a quite fascinating phenomenon psychologically that one has to face when meeting low income people: They don't necessarily want most the things you think they should want most. I remember being shocked by seeing "poor people" have IPods and IPhones or similar "luxurious" electronics while complaining that they don't have money for rent. One part of it is that electronics are actually very cheap compared to living expenses. The other part is that it does not matter what your income level is, there is still a desire for self-actualization. This last point is well argued in this following quote:
When you actually meet people living in tough conditions, you realize that they don’t exactly make up dreams for their lives in some UN-approved sequence; water first, food next, healthcare third, money fourth, philosophy when I am rich, alcohol and marijuana never. ... Humans are capable of nurturing rockstar dreams even while they are schlepping their twenty-miles-a-day to fetch water. There is a reason there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones. (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/31/the-quality-of-life/)
While I don't know exactly how, I think the insight that the receivers of social security are not primarily motivated to climb the Maslow hierarchy one level at the time, but rather shopping all levels at the same time, could be useful to build better interventions.
Cheap relative to living expenses and childcare in particular. Years ago, it was cable TV to keep kids off the street while parents were at work - now it's something with a touchscreen.
>'When you actually meet people living in tough conditions...there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones.'
Nice quote.
I think the indiscretions often come back to one thing - stress and seeking to relieve it.
Looking back my own experience, the really tough thing about being poor wasn't lacking any specific thing it was the crushing stress of constantly teetering on the brink and exhausting effort to keep from toppling.
I think the discipline of a life without small indulgences makes a person 'brittle' and invites the risk of outright breaking when some inevitable disruption is beyond your control.
Also, the stress I refer to is something I believe is frequently misunderstood and grossly underestimated. Having ample means and choosing to live spartan or fasting periodically is a toy version of actual hardship.
As a first order analysis I file these failings together with the educational ones, e.g. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738513. I was downvoted quite a bit in that thread for suggesting that some aspects of that (and I maintain this) problem can be tackled by independent, small entities (startups, if you will) rather than behemoth governmental organizations that are filled with people who are either incompetent or don't care, or if they are neither of those two quickly get depressed to minus infinity, as is the person in this piece. People argued that, no, we have to strike at the root cause of the problem: poverty. Noble as this goal is these institutions keep going on, with what seems to be increasing levels of deficiency.
And kids like Gina Presley die. Chris made it through this time due to heroic efforts of a newbie, what do you think will happen (or most probably already have) to him when he instead faces a seasoned SS worker who will be much less enthusiastic?
It comes off as an oversimplified 'Everything is better with startups!'
Cut out grating phrases like 'ingenious solutions' and 'young, energetic outsiders', articulate the idea more fully, speak with a little humility and I'd wager those posts would have fared much better - like this one [1].
I'm all for putting up such a goal for motivation. But one must win small, persistent victories along the way. As an example, Google initially won by superior technology (PageRank, GFS, etc.), they just didn't hope to "organize the world's information" by idealism. Similarly, what is the big game changers we are bringing to the "war on poverty". If we cannot name any such thing its idle talk.
I don't believe such new approaches will come from government organizations for various obvious reasons. Note that the author of this piece was a "young, energetic outsider".
Here is one: http://www.cyclesforchange.org/
Here is another: http://sisterscamelot.org/
Here is a third: http://mncee.org/
(disclosure: I work for the third)
What is the story from the social services part of this? Why are they denying so many applications? Surely the entire organization cannot just be full of people who have not but hate and loathing in their heart. Has working at such an organization for so long made them callous and depressed as well?
Perhaps what should be investigated is what sort of help social workers need to enable them to cope with their job long term?
Unfortunately, the elected officials in charge of changing the rules can get more votes by talking about other wedge issues. Worse, some of them can even get votes by peddling the myth that the poor are the ones responsible for bleeding the working class dry. This is often accompanied by a "fix" that costs more than it saves, makes life even harder for those at the bottom, and sometimes even funnels money back into the party / official's pocket (e.g. the urine test performed by a company owned by the official's wife).
It's voters that need to change, not social workers.
You need to spend your budget or you get less money. And frankly, some departments should recieve less if they come in under.
The problem is that the people who do an incompetent job and/or give out grants via patronage. They never really operating a competive service The over head is just disgusting.
You cannot fire the incompetent or the amoral. There is lots of fat to cut in these organizations. I know people that start out working hard on cases but then are nerfed to keep others from looking bad.
Hell I even offered to teach a google alert class for job seekers and the department free of charge. Did they do it... nah duplication of effort keeps their budget high and their employment stable.
I always thought a much more plausible explanation was simply the accountability gap in public policy. The voters don't care if a policy works or not, they care if it sounds like it works according to their preconceived notions about how society functions (e.g. charging people to ride the bus will save money). Analyzing policy is a difficult and thankless task. It's hard to do right and voters don't pay attention anyway.
My suggestion: give each candidate 1/2 (or 1/3 or 1/4) of a ballot page to use as they please (with caveats on sourcing data). Let the infographic battles begin! It's not a perfect solution, but I think that it could do a great deal to steer the debate back in the correct direction: the post-mortem debunkings would likely be more socially productive than any immediate effect the graphics had on voter behavior.
People just aren't equipped to put themselves out there emotionally over and over and over again day after day, particularly when a huge proportion of the time, when they do put themselves out, the outcome is awful. They retreat to a numb routine of following the rules, because, basically, they get trained to do so. When they try to bend the rules, they suffer a lot of emotional anguish for, typically, no reward.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2014/04/28/3991401.ht...
These workers are normal people, who believe the same myths that Americans do about poverty, or that most Australians do about refugees. The unusual thing is that their beliefs matter. The fact that they stick to the usual myths, when confronted with so much contradictory evidence, suggests that people aren't as free in our beliefs and actions as American and Australian mythology would hold.
In my opinion, charity is kind of a sucker's game. It's the government's job to redistribute money from the haves to the have-nots. Because they certainly won't do it themselves.
Then join up with your fellow and rise against the greedy wealthy.
Meanwhile in just a few months of dealing with the needy and not having the ability to help them all she is ground down into bitterness and cynicism. I think the subtext here points to much better reasons for the Social Services people giving her a hard time. She's just some dilettante college chick doing some good works before going off to her real career. The people who she's railing against do this for a living, and don't run away after a year. They've been working at this for their entire careers, and see people like her every day.
“Working with Social Services is hard and the stress is tremendous,” one man wrote. “You hate it. They make you feel like you’re nobody. Cow dung on someone’s shoes.”
“Social Services is very disrespectful,” complained another. “They put you in a low category, which is not fair.”
When clients lost their patience and became loud or violent they were escorted to the sheriff’s office, conveniently located in the same building. As a client pointed out to me one day, the proximity felt like entrapment.
I'd rather go to the DMV any day of the week than talk to my completely private health insurer, that's for sure .