Tuesday, December 11, 2012

It's a Setup!


Some of us are not supposed to make it. Not in a survival of the fittest way, but in a very deliberate way. Our country is set up in such a way that the very systems we are supposed to rely upon to make us Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger, are the same systems that are built to be the demise of those of us on the lower end of the totem pole, monetarily. I kind of just recently realized that I think I am one of those people. I'm a little behind, I know.

I grew up in what I now understand to be New Money. My mother had a bachelor’s degree from a college in Mexico and was a homemaker. My father does not have any college degree (I’m not even entirely certain that he graduated from high school. I know he got kicked out a lot). My dad was a professional singer for a long time, and then worked in marketing in the casinos in Atlantic City. He made a lot of money that way, and we had a beautifully landscaped home with a swimming pool. Money was a non-issue growing up, and I always assumed we had it in abundance as a kiddo.

Obviously, this was not the case. Despite my father’s success, my family spent a lot and I’m guessing we never really got ahead. My father still works, at age seventy. My mother has worked retail for the past ten years – she is fifty-nine.

As for me, I chose a career in the social services, always believing that what I do is more important than what I make. I’m in my second Master’s program at the University of Pennsylvania, making my graduate school price tag over $200,000. If I’m able to make $60,000 a year, I’ll consider myself lucky. So there’s that.

In addition to the astronomical cost of my education (which has been invaluable and made me a much better human, don’t get me wrong), I’ve become intimately familiar with the cost of healthcare for those of us that have to pay for it. Student health plans are required, and cost $3,000 a year. I just got a bill for $150.00 for a routine dermatology appointment. After I’d given them my insurance card. So…what that card is good for, I’m not entirely sure.

My friend Josh lives in Poland. He recently told me about the high cost he is paying for his graduate education - $4,000/year. I’m paying that amount per class. His wife got over a year off for maternity leave. Seriously. Go Poland.

Looking at my future, I’m afraid. I’m not a person who can dictate my life choices based on money, but I don’t want to ever feel as though I don’t have enough for basic needs, or for preventative health and dental care, or to keep my car running well. I don’t know if I’ll always have enough, and I don’t want to have to work eighteen hours days in order to have enough. This makes me sad, and nervous.

In talking with some other students at Penn, I’ve found out that many of them have no loans to speak of – that their parents are paying the entirety of their tuition. This blows my mind. Maybe these are the real privileged folks? Or maybe they, too, will eventually run out of money. I don’t know – but they’re about $200,000 head of me, and that’s got to be worth something for them.

We live in a nation that is set up specifically to keep a certain number of people afloat, in a big way. For those people, this is the best place on earth. They will continue to have a cache of money that self-recycles, and so they will also have access to the very best services and resources in the world. I think the rest of us are tricked into paying out the nose for quality, only to realize that we will never have enough to fully catch up. This keeps us at one end of a spectrum, and allows the big money to concentrate at the other end. I realize none of this is revelatory. It just makes me feel unsafe in a way I haven’t before, and I felt I had to comment. Anyone else?
 

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Lost in Translation

Community Service Centers were based on a wonderful idea. Mental health in the 1960s and early 70s was coming to a new place, a place in which the individual was going to be considered based on their own unique life experiences. Simply, a young  African-American kid in rural Georgia would be treated differently than an elderly Caucasian man from Philadelphia. The neighborhood would be part of the solution, working in conjunction with professionals in the Service Centers to create services relevant to the consumers being served.

The beauty of CSC's was dampened somewhere in the execution. At that time in history, there were almost no minority practitioners due to continued issues with racism within education and employment sectors. That left mostly White practitioners serving some communities that were made up of 100% minority populations. This stacked the odds against practitioner-community collaboration from the very start.

Beyond this, those that designed the CSC's were not the same people that implemented the plans. Ultimately, mostly White, affluent practitioners were hired - this population of workers was unable or unwilling to connect with the diverse populations of all the CSC's. When the consumers and the workers found that they could not come to consensus, issues of racism, classism, and general cultural incompetence created a lack of trust and disappointment within the communities, and the CSC's failed to fulfill their promises.

Behind many failed attempts at greatness are truly pure intentions and phenomenal ideas. The problem lies in the execution - the resulting sculpture is not at all what the sculptor intended, although the original design was amazing. I think this has something to do with ideas becoming too big, and with the hands actually implementing the procedures being too far away, sometimes states or countries away, from the minds that designed them. Too lofty, too large, too far.

So. I propose that we all pay attention to the small ways that we can do something about the little things that we see happening around us, and fill in those holes with our own hands. I've noticed that West Philadelphia lacks for therapists, and I'm initiating a private practice in the area for the teen population to try to fill that hole (and do my work that I love, of course). I can see that's done how I hope it should be, how I envision it to be, because it's just me. It's a small idea and I think I can make it happen.

What are other holes we notice? How can we fill them? What brilliant ideas can we implement within the space of our own communities, our own streets, our own homes, that might make a lasting and worthwhile impact, tiny though it may be? This seems important to me. Isn't it though?