The perception of social workers in the MSM
This past week, the School of Social Work has been all abuzz following the crass statements made regarding community organizing at the Republican National Convention. I can always tell when something’s hit a nerve by the amount of email I receive from random people who feel it necessary to shower the entire student body, faculty, and selected law students with forwarded and re-forwarded links to Sarah Palin’s speech surrounded by indignant OMGs.
Now, I generally don’t get too riled up about the mud slung by talking heads in the two major corporate-sponsored political parties, especially during their big corporate-sponsored homages to the perpetuation of our national mythology*. Nor do I tend to get too bent out of shape about what the uninformed “journalists” from our nation’s finest corporate-sponsored media outlets have to say when they chip in with their “analysis” of the “news”**. (I will now stop using quotation marks.) I am really trying to strike a balance between keeping abreast of national/global events while abstaining from the type of news programs that will just feed my bitterness about the state of things–I didn’t name this blog “shambles” for nothing, you know? However, I really don’t need to be wasting my energy listening to sound bytes from the Republamocrat conventions, tuning into that twat waffle Lou Dobbs or really even bothering with the TV much at all except to catch up on Tyra and the occasional Daily Show/Colbert Report double-header. It does nothing but raise my (genetically, very low) blood pressure to a rate so alarming, I need a cold shower afterward.
Yet I must admit–the digs about community organizing, and the subsequent ass hattery erupting in the MSM–has ruffled my normally cynical and apathetic feathers. A bee is in my bonnet. My underwear is officially in a twist!
For one thing, I’m aggravated that people keep referring to community organizing as “community service”, a phrase which is generally taken to mean, in the parlance of our times, a judicial sentencing after you get caught in acts of vandalism and/or public intoxication. It’s frustrating that even though modern social work has been around longer than the field of psychology, for example, it continues to be perceived as a kind of low-rent profession that attracts people not smart enough for other graduate studies who work with people whom the rest of society would just as soon forget exist. If people think about social work at all, it’s either because they’ve had some personal experience with one, or they are one.
But I can’t really blame the MSM for this unfortunate reality. The social work profession has of late become increasingly more concerned with its low stature in the behavioral and social science field, and has sought to beef up its credibility with increasing emphases on clinical and counseling certifications and moderate approaches to lobbying and political action–in a large way, we simply uphold the status quo by propping up this evil empire of late-stage capitalism, continuing to play the insurance game as defined by managed care, allowing corporate lawyers and the Old White Men in Washington to dictate public policy that directly assaults our own Code of Ethics. We’ve moved away from being labor-focused, torch-carrying Socialists to moderate Democrats who only have sex in the missionary position. Yes, that’s my metaphor.
One of the reasons why I ultimately decided to come to Michigan was because of the school’s purported intense focus on community organizing and public policy, as well as its emphasis on dismantling the current power structure. I have not found the cohort of students with whom I entered the school to be overwhelmingly interested in such torch-carrying, although there are many whose dedication to the work gives me goosebumps. Perhaps the offensive comments made by Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson will energize those of us who have grown complacent to pull back and run the other way, toward our early 20th-century roots, toward real activism, coalition-building, and all-around hellraising.
*This is not entirely true.
**This is a bold-faced lie.
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September 19th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
I want you to know how much it warms my heart to hear you say “twat waffle.”
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:44 pm
[…] It was yet another reminder of something that I’ve written about here before, that being the perception of social workers in our media, pop culture, and society at large. It’s not […]