Social Work, Democracy And Self-Deception

My search for hidden meme-ing continues and as usual, it found me before I even stepped out to take a look. There are days when it seems I am the only voice of dissent in the worlds of FB and Twitter. Indeed, I cannot recall anything off of the top of my head that was about someone else questioning the views of social workers, on a page about social work. Usually a meme gets liked and shared faster than I can digest its meaning and that is part of what concerns me.

Rather than just go mad (or more mad) by not saying anything, I continue with (hopefully) gentle reminders about what may really be going on. I do remember adhering to the codes of my profession, spoken and unspoken, and how hard it was to look at myself, what I was doing and who I was doing it for.

It is not my intention to pick on Social Justice Solutions. They come up a lot because they are prolific in their posting and they have more than 139K “followers”, at the time of this writing. They tend to bring focus to The Guardian and the orders for the profession that seem to be coming straight from London. So, with that said, this applies to any person, or organization, who may relish the good old days of the “State”, or who may believe that the state is just broken and can be fixed with more of the state.

The quote, the meme and my response. Oh: it took years for me to get this. It seems quite odd that a meme can challenge government while embracing it at the same time, but that is what humans do, these days:

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”

― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Good point. The USA is a corporation. Taking it another step: Democracy is mob rule. It is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. This meme assumes democracy is the highest to which humans can aspire and that itself is propaganda. These same governments decide what the social work profession is about, how to teach it, accredit it, regulate it, and how to use the middle class to keep the lower class in line, for them.

Who owns/controls @NASW? … Very thought provoking posts. I appreciate the space to share my thoughts. I hope I do not come off as unkind. From my perspective I am just sounding the alarm for my brothers and sisters.”