No Moore

At 9:00pm on Tuesday, December 12th, I thought about how absurd it was that I was sitting on my couch with my eyes glued to my laptop screen as the results from the Alabama Senate race came in county-by-county.

Over the past two decades of election cycles, I witnessed one circus geek-show after another; each more bizarre than the one before. The increasingly shrinking pool of ostensibly "serious" candidates appear to be preparing their stump-speeches for the lowest common denominators of their political bases and featuring only the hot-button topics that were pre-tested by their respective party platforms.

What used to be known as the "fringe" candidates have become the mainstream and the gradual break-down of political norms has been on full display on a 24-hour news cycle for many years.
Some people would like us to believe that this problem exists equally on "both sides" of the political spectrum. It is beyond the scope of a single blog post to demonstrate just how asymmetrical this problem is. It is manifestly a right-wing fanaticism and a base-tribalism in the Republican Party that is creating a level of toxicity in politics sufficient to turn off a generation young voters and future civil servants.

Before last Tuesday I thought that the purest distillation of the problem was the candidacy and election of Donald John Trump. Now I have a new date to mark the calendar: December 12, 2017.
The celebrity and name-recognition of DJT gave him a distinct advantage in this "reality television" culture. Indeed, Trump's entire celebrity has always been driven by his buffoonery and boorishness coupled with his own lack of self-awareness. In other words, he ain't in on the joke!

The RNC-supported candidacy of the twice-removed-from-the-bench Roy Moore is; however, no joke.
Tribalism and hate-for-the-other has never been given such a prominent role in electoral politics as it has in the Alabama Senate race.
A man who has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, as well as many other egregious violations of the constitution nearly took a seat in the United States Senate.
Had he won, Roy Moore would have had a vote and a voice on issues that effect the lives of hundreds of millions people in the US alone. The fact that nearly one-third of the American population and virtually half of the state that he almost represented was ravenous for his leadership is an arresting and chilling reality that should give us all cause to look carefully at where we are as a country and who we want to be on the world stage.

Donald Trump and Roy Moore are mirrors for us all to look very carefully in to. It doesn't matter if you are as shocked and outraged as the vast majority of the United States and the rest of the world is. The fact is, we all let the whole world down, either by explicitly voting for these malevolent and dangerously unqualified candidates, or complicity facilitating their rise in politics by taking our hands off the wheel of Democracy.

The Horror of Hammer Violence in America

Every time there is another mass shooting in America, the internet is awash with gun-rights advocates' criminally fallacious and aggressively moronic posts like the one above. As one of my favorite memes that is going around lately says in response to similar expressions of willful ignorance:

Without getting into the myriad of reasons why these "why don't we ban blunt instruments?" arguments are demonstratively false, I think that it is important to recognize the fact that mass shootings have a devastating impact that goes far beyond the wounds and fatalities that they cause at the scene of the crime.
Each day there is another story in the news about another shooting that occurred in a different community. They happen in malls, movie theaters, churches, concert events, schools, on our streets and in homes. It has gotten to the point where no one can truthfully say that they are ever completely safe from it ever happening in their neighborhoods or kid's playgrounds. Soon, like me, we will all have a relative or friend who could have very easily been in the same spot at the same time that one of these horrific events take place and wake up wondering, "was he or she there when this happened?"
Today I find myself looking around when I am in crowds and thinking to myself, "I wonder if this is the type of place where someone might be looking to go down in a blaze of glory". In fact, I was at the State House last month to watch the proceedings of the special legislative session and I had to go through a metal detector. Metal detectors are nothing new, especially in an environment like that, but this time it had an ominous feel to it as I took off my belt and dropped it into a plastic bin.
When I went up into the public gallery, I will tell you one thing that did not occur to me and that was, "I wonder if any of these people have a hammer".
Mental health depends to some degree on one's ability to feel like their basic needs are being met. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs places safety and security as one of the foundational levels of psychological health. One's need for safety and security is being challenged everyday in places like Chicago's lower-income communities and similar urban environments all over the country. But today; however, it is becoming increasingly salient in suburban and rural America that no one is safe from this epidemic of gun violence.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/chicagos-gun-violence-crisis-also-mental-health-crisis/

The Warfield

I remember that long drive west on the California Delta Highway from Stockton to the San Fransisco Bay. My brothers and I made our perennial pilgrimage to see the Grateful Dead on New Year's Eve at the Warfield on the Bay.
Somewhere on the Cal. State Rt. 24, between Walnut Creek and the San Fransisco Bridge, was "Gunsmokeland", or "Cokeland" California. We made a point to make that leg of the journey during the daylight hours.
Oakland California was legendary for many reasons but among the fans at the Dead concerts it was mostly known as the place where you do not want to go stumbling around after the show gets out at night.

During the late 80's and early 90's, Oakland had nearly twice the homicide rate as San Fransisco or New York. And during the first decade of the 21st century it was considered to be in the top 10 most dangerous cities in America. If someone told me in 1995 that the cost of rent in those terrifying hinterlands across the bridge would in two short decades be the second to fastest rising in the country, I would never believe them. But then again, I had never heard of Gentrification back then either.

Like Brooklyn New York's transformation during the last few decades of the 20th century, the city of Oakland is gradually showing signs of affluence and and racial homogeneity as more members of minority communities head for the surrounding suburbs. The sharp increases in rents and property values are driving lower income families further inland and the richness of culture and diversity of the neighborhoods fade in their wake.
From one perspective this is a welcome change, the streets in some communities are safer, ghettos in disrepair are being replaced by condominium complexes, and liquor stores are transforming into coffee bars and vape shops.
But what about the lives of those who have to commute for hours to work for minimum wage? What about the families that must double or triple up in small apartments outside of the communities where they grew up? Perhaps there may have been better ways to make the streets safer and the housing more affordable than to simply displace them with hipster- millennials.

I grew up in Portland Maine and I moved away during the late 80's up until about the turn of the 21st century. When I got back to Portland the first thing I noticed was all of the restaurants, art galleries, clothing consignment shops, and the unrecognizable transformation of "Munjoy Hill" (used to be the nearest thing to a ghetto in the downtown area, now it is the symbol of concentrated gentrification in Porland).
My early imressions were good...it looked to me like Portland was thriving and businesses were regaining a foothold in the city that at one time seemed to be going the way of Detroit and fading into the ashheap of history. However, now I have had the experience of working in Portland but finding it impossible to live in the same city because of soaring rents.
Some of the residents of Oakland may be reveling in the changes to their city, but there are many who would have preferred to stay where they were as well as enjoying safer communities. Maybe people should invest some of their resources not only to purchase properties, but also in the schools, community centers, education and job training and perhaps the city's transformation would benefit everyone and not just those who can afford it.

Gentrification transforming face of Oakland http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Gentrification-transforming-face-of-Oakland-5387273.php

Wicked Bad

I woke up Monday morning and the first news I heard was about a mass shooting in Las Vegas. I found out quickly that it had happened at an outdoor concert downtown on the famous "Strip".
My younger brother works for a company that does the technical rigging for lighting and scaffolding for just such events in that area.
I picked up my phone and I sent a single text: "you alright?"
A short time later when my brother awoke and read my text he replied: "I'm good; I was working a different event further down the strip"
As simple as the exchange of texts may seem, the fact is that I was checking to see if he was alive...for real. This is what it's like to have it hit pretty close to home. It was just a matter of time.
I thought about how my brother and his young daughter now live in the community that just experienced one of the worst mass shootings on record. How will things change for them? What sort of new security measures will be taken to assure that this can't happen again? Will there be new legislation to strengthen gun regulation?
The sound from the hundreds of shots that were fired from the 32nd floor of a Tropicana Street hotel will echo through the streets for years to come. The only sound to rival the horrors of yet another automatic weapon used to commit mass murder is the sound of deafening silence coming from the White House and the Halls of Congress.
The issue is that many legislators in the House and Senate, members of the Administration, the Judiciary, powerful lobbying groups and other parties with converging interests would like you to believe that gun control is a "wicked problem".
After reading the selected chapter from Wicked Problems and Social Complexity (Conklin, 2005), I began to see how the political spin on the issue of gun control is meant to make the problem seem intractable and that powerful forces are at work to create the appearance of social and technical complexity. It is held that this complexity makes any reasonable attempt to solve problem likely to have a negative impact on something else of equal or greater concern. Talking points are aimed at creating confusion, ambiguity, and equally distributed blame across many social influences. The ultimate goal of these efforts appears to be for profit and political expedience.
 The truth is, gun control is not a wicked problem at all. There is nothing intractable or technically complex about sensible firearm regulations and the only negative impact will be on the bottom line of a gun manufacturer's profit and loss report and on the reelection campaign coffers of the many unscrupulous lawmakers who enable these massacres through inaction and willful ignorance.

Refernces:

Conklin, J.E. (2005). Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. 

 

  Rittel & Weber, (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning

Inequality = Instability

During the presidential campaign of 2011 and 2012, Mitt Romney kept using one particular phrase that really made me angry and that phrase was "politics of envy".
The arrogance and willful ignorance that goes with the notion that everyone who is increasingly alarmed by the growing gulf between the rich and the poor in this country, and choose to speak out about it, are envious of one's "wealth" is beyond measure.
 Richard Wilkinson's TED talk "How Economic Inequality Harms Societies" makes it perfectly clear just how self-defeating and short-sighted a mindset which assumes poor people are flawed, lazy, and resentful towards honest and hard-working Americans really is by the numbers.
Wilkinson chose a unique perspective to deliver his message by illustrating the degradation of society as a function of the rise of mental illness, strains on the cost of medical and emergency services, violent crime, markedly reduced trust among citizens and towards their government, increased apathy and learned-helplessness, and many other issues that will ultimately have a measurable impact on the continued culture of consumerism here in America.
Even if one is inclined to feel attacked or chooses to go on the defensive whenever anyone dares to call out the injustices of inequality, one is still certain to find that as the middle-class decays away and all we are left with are Princes and Poppers, that the wealthy class will have no one left to underwrite their extravagant lifestyles through revenue taxes and cheap labor.
No Mr. Romney, I don't envy your wealth at all...clearly it has had no positive affect on your character.

...until our Nation's leaders can figure out what the Hull is going on

David Brooks, of the failing New York Times, argues the merits of a Hull-House style approach to benefit both the poor and the wealthy, the old and the young, and the immigrant as well as the "old stock", all under the same roof of an institution designed to embody the principles of humanist philosophy and the mutual exchange of knowledge, art, and goodwill.
Jane Addams was a strong-minded and idealistic woman of the 19th century who was born into affluence and privilege with a mind for social justice and the material means to explore the world and acquire works of fine art and literature which she would later share with a very diverse population in the Chicago community where she established Hull House in 1889. The large mansion, which was located near the West side of Chicago, first opened its doors to newly arrived immigrants and later became the arts and community center for thousands of people to use as a cultural and educational epicenter for what later became the Nation-wide Settlement House movement.

The Settlement House Movement was indeed the roots of early Social Work in the United States.
What made Hull House unique and far ahead of its time was the idea of sharing not only basic living resources and cultural competencies, but also a great deal of emphasis was placed on the exchange of ideas, arts, humanities, classical education, and creative expression through writing.

 Another, more recognizably modern function of the Settlement House movement was the systematic and scientific models of social research that was facilitated by volunteers and members of the community in which these arts and community centers were located. This research informed the work of the social welfare reformers that became the first wave of activist social workers and macro practitioners who were concerned with matters of public policy for the good of the entire diverse communities.

I read Brook's article only a couple of weeks after one of my cohorts in the MSW program at USM and I attended a staff meeting at Florence House, which is a homeless shelter, collection of Safe Havens, and residential community for the chronically homeless women in the Southern Maine/Greater Portland area where she and I are both interns learning the fundamentals of case management and community relations.
It was at this meeting where one of the directors of the program and an employee of Preble Street Organization gave a little push-back at the suggestion that staff work in concert with the other members of the community to try to create more of a "home-like", or cohesive community dynamic in order to both address some of the issues of cleanliness and interpersonal conflicts that are characteristic of the place and continue to be a source of tension and frequent disruption among the population on a very regular basis.

Although the reasons that she gave us were not unfamiliar, I was surprised to hear that the position she had on the matter was that we weren't there to provide a "home" as much as a safe place for the women to plan their means to moving into more suitable living circumstances outside of the temporary "shelter". This reasoning sounded more like the conservative's position of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps than the model of the old Settlement House movement.
I was an undergraduate studying psychology at USM when I took my intro to Sociology class and I had been introduced to the Hull House and the history of the scientific method as it applied to the early development of Social Work. This is one of the first seeds that ultimately grew into my interest in the field. And it is my belief that Social Work, as a profession, needs to reconnect with these roots in order to address the issues facing our society today more than ever in my lifetime.
It is discouraging to find that providers of direct services like the one's found on offer at Preble Street and the growing organizational facilities would see the mission as a means to relay people from homelessness, drug addiction, and profound untreated mental illness to places more suitable to provide services closer to the medical model of deficit reduction instead of the strengths-based approach inherit in our professional foundations.
What we need is a new Renaissance type resurgence of the Settlement House movement starting with Florence House and moving its way through the rest of Preble Street's facilities.

Community Research

I decided to enter into the field of social work because I wanted to join the fight for social justice. As an undergraduate, I took a special interest in social psychology and sociology. While taking these courses, I saw how easily the people who live in communities with lower resources, high levels of poverty, poor sanitation, ambiguous political representation, high crime and aggressive policing practices could fall into complacency and despair.
Just as an individual could become so used  to being marginalized and ineffective as an advocate for themselves that they fall into a state of "learned helplessness", I saw that entire communities could suffer the same fate collectively. This becomes a viscous cycle which is usually identified by people from high-resource communities as a sort of sickness or willful deviance on the part of their disadvantaged neighbors.
I am working as an intern at Preble Street's Florence House, which is an emergency shelter as well as a residential home and safe-havens for the chronically homeless women in the Southern Maine area. Our text book indicates that there are often problems in identifying the somewhat arbitrary boundaries that define a "community", but after working at Florence House for nearly a year now, it is clear to me that I am working in a community that is unique within the larger surrounding geographical communities in which many of the women were once a part of.
Our readings for the week identified community-based research as three different and distinct functions: Research On the community, Research In the community, and Research With the community (Weil, Reisch, & Ohmer 2013). As a student in graduate school, many of the articles that I have read over the school year have featured the plight of the homeless, drug addicted, and chronically mentally ill. In this role as a student, I am doing research On the community. As an intern during my first semester at Florence House, I was mostly working as a support staff member. I helped manage the milieu, opened lockers and showers, did laundry, and provided assistance in anyway that I could be useful throughout the day. In this capacity, I am doing research In the community.
This semester, I am learning how to do casework. As such, I enter into a partnership with clients so that together we can work to try to find resources and activities that could lead to improved health, employment, financial resources, and ultimately more secure housing. This is what I consider doing research With the community.
Next year, my internship is with the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). It is my goal to work as a Macro Practitioner in social work, so this will be an exciting opportunity for me and my development as a student and professional social worker in the future. My experience at Florence House has been very valuable research on, in, and with a community that has a need for advocacy and for people to add to their voices for justice. Each barrier that my clients and I encounter while trying to move their cases forward is like a brick wall that we need to take apart at the mortar. As we look into our bag of blunted tools, I look towards the future for when I am in Augusta working with legislators who have the power to sharpen and even provide new tools that could be more effective in taking those walls down.

References:

Weil, M., Reisch, M., & Ohmer, M. (2013). The Handbook of Community Practice. 2nd Edition.

Horizontal Giving

I grew up during a time when people still talked about having lived in communes. These were environments where communities were made up of families, extended families, artists, craftsman, horticulturalists, gardeners, teachers, and other members who all played some role in contributing to the overall welfare of the group.
Although communes existed, in some form, in all areas including urban communities, they were mostly found in rural settings. Water was drawn from wells, electricity from a generator (and used sparingly), food was grown in the ground and people shared everything with each other.
Our text book describes Horizontal Giving as characterized by "reciprocity, cooperation, and interdependence" (467). Many forms of sharing tangible goods as well as valuable services like child care, elderly assistance, emotional support and the security of community members is offered, without deliberation, simply for the greater good of the community writ large.
Rural communities adopt this type of Horizontal Giving spirit out of necessity, tradition, and a sense of real relationships with those who's lives they are so closely intertwined with as well as a commitment to the maintenance of their ways of life. They are one step beyond the primal simplicity of the loose structures found in hippie communes, mostly manifest in the fact that people have jobs, maintain private ownership of their homes, and participate in the political process where it relates to local concerns. However, the communal spirit is not far removed in many cases.
I spent the first years of my life first in an urban commune, then on a farm in rural Maine, in the northern part of the state. I have vivid memories of neighbors kids coming and going without parental constraints, people coming over to borrow sugar, flour, or baking soda for making confections to bring to a school event, and dads doing "odd jobs" around the town mending fences, building backyard decks for the summer months, and other quaint tasks of similar utility.
It wasn't until I moved to the affluent suburb community of Falmouth that I realized how people were still ostensibly connected to each other through community features and activities, but were also paradoxically stratified by class which was usually identifiable simply by noting their address and the specific neighborhood where they live in relation to other, less affluent community members.
Horizontal Giving was not as pure and freely practiced there. People were more inclined to try to leverage each other in often subtle, and often overt ways through their acts of giving which made it less "horizontal" and a bit more "vertical" in nature. In other words, it was not uncommon for there to be a winner and a loser resulting in a zero-sum game for the community members who are interlocked in these exchanges.
And then there's Las Angeles.
Not only do people not engage in Horizontal Giving in this large, metropolitan sprawl, they are vastly cut off from one another by seemingly infinite boundaries ranging from personal, socioeconomic disparities, language and cultural barriers, and race.
Giving is transactional and conditional. Cheating is commonplace and trust is rare between strangers. But, other than sheer population, why is it that the larger the communities, the more people become isolated from each other? It is, indeed, counter intuitive.

References:

Weil, M., Reisch, M., & Ohmer, M. (2013). The Handbook of Community Practice. 2nd Edition.

Dominant Culture

There many problems that can be attributed to the dominant culture's inability or unwillingness to share in an exchange of ideas, or in the reciprocal benefits of mutual cooperation with other cultures and other members of society that do not enjoy equal status of privilege.
Many of the issues are created when too much separation exists between the established norms which are built up through habitual decrees of those at the top of the power structure and blindly followed by those at the bottom simply because "that's the way we were told to do it, because that's the way it has always been done".
It is in this way that the dominant culture also suffers because it becomes mired down in the mud of their own complacency and further serves as the catalyst to their own struggles with deleterious class conflicts.
In a corporate environment, for example, the executives and members of upper management may believe that the punitive approach to demands on productivity may yield the most measurable benefits. However, it can often be seen that the demoralizing effects of the Machiavellian leadership style is followed by a decrease in the quality of overall performance, a strain on the sense of loyalty within an organization, and instability ultimately among the inner circles of leadership.
I just watched the President's (Trump's) address to both houses of congress. Rarely has there been such an example of what can happen when the sheer magnitude of financial and celebrity power, in a culture that reveres both, meets the methods by which to seize the ultimate power of government.
Within his inner circle, no one would ever dare to tell him to think more carefully about a decision that he makes impulsively. And outside of his circle the message is controlled, sanitized, repackaged, or outright omitted if it is deemed to be ill-suited for his unstable sensibilities.
Creating a more level playing field, or "equalizing power differentials", as is suggested in (Weil, Reisch, & Ohmer, p. 43, 2013), could prevent a lot of suffering among his administration and, more importantly, throughout the whole country. Indeed, by allowing dissenting voices to be heard and for more two-way communications within his organization he could be persuaded to try to be more empathetic towards some of the groups that he has vilified and therefore less fear and hopelessness among those same groups. 

Weil, M., Reisch, M., & Ohmer, M. (2013). The Handbook of Community Practice. 2nd Edition.

We are the soil

Ron Finely's TED talk about LA Green Ground's mission to bring the community benefits of urban gardening to South Central LA in California reminded me of my own observations living in a similar neighborhood in Long Beach Ca., also in LA county.
One of the first things that I noticed while living there was the lack of actual grocery stores with natural foods and fresh produce; only corner convenience stores with canned goods, pickled everything, and plenty of soda and candy which was often well past the expiration date on the labels.
I also noticed, and even participated in, several graffiti projects which were very much created in a "guerilla style" ambush of an unsuspecting wall under a bridge or on the side of an abandoned warehouse.
When Finely was describing the act of gardening in the community as an artistic expression similar to graffiti, I felt like I could relate to the spirit of what it is that he uses to energize other members of the neighborhood to join in and take ownership of their part of the righteous project.
It is that sense of ownership and pride in a work that literally bears fruit that unquestionably comes from their connection to the group effort and their vested interest in seeing it through to fruition.
When Finely says "when kids grow kale; kids eat kale" is quite true. I remember teaching simple cooking skills to a young person who I had a parental relationship with and I would watch him eat the things that he had cooked himself which he would have left cold on a plate if I had made the same thing for him. The difference is the fact that he had created it himself. He faced the challenge, suffered the frustration, and eventually saw his efforts pay off. The kids in South Central LA probably had a similar experience with their urban gardens.
Another powerful image in the TED talk was when Finely says "we are the soil". It is more than a metaphor when one considers what soil is and how it serves to produce fruits, vegetables, and other plants and flowers. Importantly, soil is distinct from dirt because fecund soil has rich nutrients which must be added from an outside source in an urban environment. The young people of a community like South Central, or Long Beach Ca. also flourish when they are given nutrients of both the literal variety, as well as the more ecological nutrients that comes from being involved in such a healthy and bountiful project as gardening in LA.

We Are the Soil

Ron Finely's TED talk about LA Green Ground's mission to bring the community benefits of urban gardening to South Central LA in California reminded me of my own observations living in a similar neighborhood in Long Beach Ca., also in LA county.
One of the first things that I noticed while living there was the lack of actual grocery stores with natural foods and fresh produce; only corner convenience stores with canned goods, pickled everything, and plenty of soda and candy which was often well past the expiration date on the labels.
I also noticed, and even participated in, several graffiti projects which were very much created in a "guerilla style" ambush of an unsuspecting wall under a bridge or on the side of an abandoned warehouse.
When Finely was describing the act of gardening in the community as an artistic expression similar to graffiti, I felt like I could relate to the spirit of what it is that he uses to energize other members of the neighborhood to join in and take ownership of their part of the righteous project.
It is that sense of ownership and pride in a work that literally bears fruit that unquestionably comes from their connection to the group effort and their vested interest in seeing it through to fruition.
When Finely says "when kids grow kale; kids eat kale" is quite true. I remember teaching simple cooking skills to a young person who I had a parental relationship with and I would watch him eat the things that he had cooked himself which he would have left cold on a plate if I had made the same thing for him. The difference is the fact that he had created it himself. He faced the challenge, suffered the frustration, and eventually saw his efforts pay off. The kids in South Central LA probably had a similar experience with their urban gardens.
Another powerful image in the TED talk was when Finely says "we are the soil". It is more than a metaphor when one considers what soil is and how it serves to produce fruits, vegetables, and other plants and flowers. Importantly, soil is distinct from dirt because fecund soil has rich nutrients which must be added from an outside source in an urban environment. The young people of a community like South Central, or Long Beach Ca. also flourish when they are given nutrients of both the literal variety, as well as the more ecological nutrients that comes from being involved in such a healthy and bountiful project as gardening in LA.