Blue Notes from a Red Zone

Season of Hope

Each year, it seems harder to buckle down to work after the holidays. There is, of course, a certain amount of exhaustion that follows the holiday whirl, but that’s just a small part of it. The primary factor has to do with the coming of the new year, and the compulsion to take stock of what has come before and what lies ahead. It’s quite daunting.

The societal problems I address are intractable, and the resources I personally bring to the effort are inadequate. The temptation I face is to dismiss any idea that I could actually bring long-term change as arrogant, and to retreat into my own garden. After all, Voltaire described it as a good plan, and who am I to argue with one of the greatest minds of western civilization? Naturally, I can also dismiss the idea that Voltaire hardly took his own advice, and as a result accounted for seismic changes in thought that still reverberate today. I am not Voltaire, and it is ludicrous to assume I have anything near the consequence necessary to effect societal-changing reform.

None of this angst was evident yesterday, however, when I met with a bright young woman attending a Florida college, and seeking a career in social work. I fell into my career through some weird compulsion never fully understood. She is going into it with purpose, enthusiasm, and intelligence. She wants to make an informed choice as to where to best put her energies, and she was open to a root-cause analysis that made it very clear that problems are complex, interconnected, and overwhelming. Spending time with her was encouraging and helpful to me in multiple respects, and I spent a more productive afternoon than has been my norm this week. However, it didn’t get to the root cause of my annual trial of doubt.

One of the books I’ve been reading lately is David Shipler’s “The Working Poor.” He poignantly describes a young, single, working mother whose substandard housing contributes to a child’s asthma attacks. This in turn leads to days absent from work, which leads to reduced income, which means she can’t afford a car, which means she needs to call an ambulance when her child becomes desperately short of oxygen. She can’t pay the ambulance bill, her credit rating falls, which affects her ability to get a better job. Her family falls into homelessness, and despair.

Mr. Shipler does an excellent job of describing all kinds of inter-relating calamities that collectively condemn this woman and her children into a shadow existence. What I find most distressing, however, is that I could add so many more. Those who are on the edges of society are not only prey to employers that cheat their employees, and check-cashing companies that serve as the usurious banks for the poor, and furniture-rental stores that collect fees that far exceed the value of goods rented. They are also prey to crime, to rape, to trauma of all kinds that sap the energy and will to prevail. Parents who were children themselves when they first gave birth have limited literacy skills, and lack the resources with which to prepare their children for a better life. Those who struggle with mental illness are caught in a nightmare in which drug costs exceed potential income, and make any employment virtually impossible. Jails have become our mental health institutions, with damaging effects on eventual recovery.

So where to start? Finding shelter and jobs is certainly a worthwhile goal, but without education, trauma recovery, financial counseling, life skills coaching, and various forms of advocacy, such efforts are stop-gap at best. We need better foster care systems, and victim advocates, and accessible mental health and substance abuse recovery facilities. We need to stop jailing seven out of every 1,000 members of our society (the highest rate in the world, bar none) and concentrate on dealing with the mental illness and substance abuse disorders that create overcrowded jail and prison conditions. How do we achieve these things, and more importantly, how do we execute our solutions to make them effective? It’s January. I have no idea.

By this time next month, I will be immersed in the day-to-day details of my life, and will have abandoned the reflection that can lead to paralysis. But the questions will remain in the back of my mind: Is this enough? Is this the best I can do? Is there hope of a better and brighter society?

I wait for spring, and a new season of hope.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 10:17 AM