Monday, January 26, 2015

The Politics of Poverty and My Questions About Modern-Day Social Work

**Disclaimer: This blog post is way too long to be considered very well written. Plus it sort of rambles. If you do get through it, I’d love your comments. I’m extroverted and like to process things with others, so I’m not presenting answers (which is obvious since I hardly have any), but am mulling through personal thoughts and experiences. What I love about engaging others in these topics is that others can help me see things in a way I may not see on my own.**
When I was a teenager I remember walking one of my family’s dogs around our roughly 1,500 house neighborhood and daydreaming. I wasn’t usually the one to daydream about weddings; I tended to daydream about curing cancer. It was usually very specific… I was on the Today Show discussing how I discovered the cure specific to breast cancer, but only if it had been detected within a certain number of months. It was specific, but a breakthrough that could lead to more! (As a creative writer, I had very detailed daydreams.)
As a teenager I also became very interested in politics and thought about going to grad school for a Masters in Political Science. Combined with my Public Relations undergrad, the idea of being a political speech writer intrigued me (one could even say the creative writing skill would come in handy- ok a sad, but somewhat realistic, joke). For my undergrad degree I even interned at the North Carolina headquarters for a particular political party. I loved to write and I loved politics and it seemed like a good path. Yet, God had a different plan and that involved divinity school.
Divinity School is probably where I had the first inklings of giving up my desire to save the world and instead just focus on loving my neighbor. Some of the best parts of my education were spent outside the classroom…. a summer in Waco, Texas that was revolutionary in my life and involved attending church under an interstate overpass, another summer in a bilingual church when I didn’t know Spanish and had a small glimpse into what it feels like to be marginalized, a winter on the West Side of Chicago, and a trip to Belize that opened my eyes to one of my spiritual gifts. By the time I graduated from divinity school in 2008 I had very different views of the world than I previously had. It’s very hard to talk about the poor in an objective sense, essentially viewing an entire segment of America as a statistic, when you’ve played Scrabble at the homeless shelter and realized your tablemates weren’t strangers, but somewhere along the line had become friends.
I eventually pursued a Master of Social Work, but it was always in the pursuit of a biblical view of social justice. I wanted a social work degree to aid my Master of Divinity degree. The combination of theology and social work is dear to my heart and if you read the Bible- really read the Bible- you’ll see the message woven throughout that Jesus commands, as opposed to suggests, that we care for our neighbors, particularly the vulnerable.
I’m now a practicing social worker working toward my full license, but the purpose of social work is something that often rattles around in my brain. I think of Jane Adams and the Hull House of Chicago and consider that most modern-day social work barely resembles its origins. Social work was about challenging unfair systems and being relational neighbors with others. In fact, the origins of social work are very biblical. Now, social work seems to mean being a government employee with all the benefits thereof.
These thoughts came to the forefront of my mind as I listened to a well-accomplished social worker speak recently. She had wonderful advice and had done a lot for people. However, she discussed that the state had received more money and now DSS could hire a good number of intake assessment workers to help people determine eligibility for benefits.
I sat in my seat wondering, “Is this the right response?” Is it reasonable to see a need and solve it by hiring more people to distribute resources as solutions? Are these solutions sustainable? How do we reconcile an economy with a supposed budget with the well-being of our neighbors? But the main question that flooded my mind was, “Why is the solution to hire more people to assess for benefits? Why don’t we look at society and seriously consider why the need is growing? If social work does what it intends to do, we should get to the day when others don’t need to have their incomes assessed to get by. Doesn’t the system often seem to encourage us to see others as objective statistics?”
It would be absolutely awesome if I had answers to these questions. The truth of the matter is, there aren’t enough people who care to address the problem to rid the need of government involvement. And if my faith informs my life, and the Bible is clear about caring for the poor, shouldn’t I vote in a way that focuses on the marginalized? After all, the abolitionists could only do so much without the Emancipation Proclamation.
But then I think about what a classmate in divinity school once said about how Jesus never told us to vote a man into office to give out cloaks, but to give our own cloak. How do I reconcile that statement of blunt truth with the severe need in our nation and the lack of personally invested people to partner in those needs? How do I reconcile my personal views of social justice with what society says it is?
One of the ways my faith involves my social work practice is that I fully believe relationships are the point of life. We were made to be in relationship with God, and then with each other. The Bible is the story of our Creator pursuing us for relationship. Personal change doesn’t happen because someone was accepted into a program with an income assessor; change happens because someone entered a relationship with another person who was a neighbor, and ultimate change happens when someone enters a relationship with the living Christ. So then the question ceases to be so much about how programs are run as much as it is about who I am in relationship with others and what greater Hope I point toward.
One of the reasons everyone seems to have a different view of what is appropriate social justice is that we all see the world through the specific lens of our experience and if that’s all we’ve known, we have to work to consider other experiences. For me, growing up in middle-class America with a military father, I learned what I call “the boot camp mentality.” You have to start at the bottom and you may get treated unfairly and get overloaded with grunt work, but its part of the process of growing in a career. My father is a hard-working man and I learned a lot from him. As I’ve grown into an adult, I’ve seen that my boot camp started at a higher level than many others. My parents worked hard to provide for our family and I got to start at a middle-class boot camp; not everyone starts there.

So is the answer that people just need to work harder? Logic and reason say to work hard and you’ll work your way to the top. I think most of us have lived long enough to realize people are more complicated than logic and reason. Psychology, though it may be a soft science, is one of the most powerful and insightful fields of study. People are a messy combination of reason, emotions, fears, defenses, hopes, confusions, and complexities. Our environment shapes the way we see the world. It’s as if children get a pass until they turn 18 and once that happens, they should know better. We say children didn’t choose to be born and yet, somehow, with poverty and the messages received growing up, we expect them to magically become adults who resemble us; who act and think like we do. It doesn’t work that way.

How do we hold in tension the various factors of poverty: environment, early childhood influences, a history of oppression in our country, and the psychology of what it means to grow up in a neighborhood different than I did? We want to sift through the populous and crown the worthy poor; those who we determine to deserve the aid. And yet, Jesus was all about us- who aren’t worthy at all, but receive his grace.

So, with all the factors of different experiences, legitimate system abuse, and need that doesn’t seem to be shrinking, what is the marriage between the broader scope of the government to handle issues and the private and church population? I’m a proponent of separation of church and state, but that doesn’t mean the approach to poverty can only be one or the other.
In terms of politics I like to think I’m middle of the road (talk about bi-partisan, in 2008 I donated to the Obama campaign and then decided to vote for McCain). I am under no illusion that a man-made political party can remedy all of our nation’s ills. Nor do I think the government is the sole answer. I’ve run HUD programs for the homeless and they are full of ridiculous notions that make it easy for someone to stay in poverty. I’ve actually once said out loud, “HUD breaks my heart.”

Realizing my views of poverty are limited in that I’ve never been in poverty, I’ve come to the conclusion that government involvement has the potential to be a good thing. Programs aren’t either all good or all bad, they help some people, but they’re also dysfunctional. I can’t support some of the ways HUD runs things and frankly, programs like food stamps barely resemble what they were intended to be (check out the history of food stamps being a means to meet the needs of hunger and farmer surplus and that people took ownership in the program by investing in it with their own money and getting a return that they couldn’t have gotten with their original investment alone).

I still haven’t been able to answer my own questions and the more I try to answer them, the more questions I have. There’s valuable experience I have and so much that I don’t know. Perhaps answering the questions isn’t the point. I so easily focus on what I should be doing, what the government should be doing, what the church should be doing, and forget to remember who we are supposed to BE. Regardless of whether government programs exist or not, it doesn’t change my responsibility to live out my faith in a way that cares for the least of these. I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter if HUD has policies that are blind to reality or food stamps and social security aren’t currently what they were intended to be. My calling is to love God and love my neighbors. That’s the call. The way in which that call manifests itself is different for each person. Some are called to challenge policy, some are called to address the needs of poverty in other ways. But all of us are called to be relational neighbors.

Maybe it’s time I stop letting myself get distracted with the arguments about politics and social work and into what they have evolved. It’s easy to get distracted by a think tank type of mentality and argue theories, yet I’ve come to realize that my call to love my neighbor  has very little to do with what it means to be a social worker; it’s about being a follower of Christ. I need to stop being distracted by what doesn’t matter. The method, whether it be social work or not, isn’t the point. The relationship is.