{William Cerf's Creativity Journal
}
Csikszentmihalyi quotes the poet Goyory Faludy who states in part “we are a perverse race, only suffering interests us” (Csikszentmihalyi 84). My interest is in the suffering of marginalized people who inhabit that long list of categories of people who have in my view been more marginalized than I myself have been as a handicapped (i.e. hearing impaired person with a speech impediment). The homeless, houseless, felonious black and brown people who are also poor and suffer from the total institutionalism imposed by the social welfare systems, the shelters, hospitals and jails of our society. I would never have had a clue about this if I had not had mental health problems and been subjected to these systems myself. I did not come to appreciate the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because I’m an idealist. I came to appreciate his legacy due to my own suffering, through which I was able to see his point about the need to lift the load of poverty. What I experienced were organizations and service agencies that were highly bureaucratic and more concerned with “the rules” than with helping a person in need of assistance. An example is when I applied to the vocational rehab agency in New York (then called VESID and now called Access V-R.). I felt dehumanized and became determined to learn more and resist that dehumanization. My research so far has yielded other examples.
The movement to establish shelters for the homeless and victims of domestic violence was seen as a temporary problem in the 1970’s when the movement began but as these problems persisted and the numbers grew, the social service agencies running these services became overwhelmed and resorted to creating a rigid bureaucracy to handle the increasing population of people who were abused and/or homeless. DeWard and Moe, in discussing women’s narrative of surviving a shelter show the life to be one of living in a total institution. Erving Goffman describes the “total institution” in his groundbreaking work Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. These institutions have rigid rules and regulations thus creating a “systematic deterioration of personhood and loss of autonomy.” Additionally there is a definite “us” vs. “them” mentality in the shelter environment (DeWard and Moe).
Aha, my domain is social justice advocacy! Which has to do with the social service or helping professions that deal with marginalized people. I sense that following the crowd in social justice advocacy work is to start a corporation or get a job and do what you can within the context of what I see as the total institutional setting. One area of inquiry that seems important to me are systems society has devised to deal with people in need of assistance, in other words the social service bureaucracy. According to Bauman, “The specifically bureaucratic way of running things is founded on a strict chain of command and equally strict definitions of the roles ascribed to every link in the chain” (Bauman 5). Bureaucracies are meant to be rational entities that do not allow for what Bauman calls “voice of conscience” that might prompt a worker to want to help a suffering client/consumer. Another area of research is to investigate the concept of ally development that has been posited by practitioner-scholars Anne Bishop and Keith Edwards among others in the burgeoning field of social justice education. My intention is to create allies (alliances) made up of marginalized people of all kinds, idealists and people willing to look at their own prejudices and discrimination for the purpose of reigniting the Poor People’s Campaign to end poverty.
Works Cited
Bauman, Zygmunt. "Alone Again: Ethics after Certainty." London, UK: Demos, 1994. Print.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1996. Print.
DeWard, Sarah L., and Angela M Moe. ""Like a Prison!": Homeless Women's Narratives of Surviving Shelter." Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 37.1 (2010): 115 - 35. Print.