[nfbmi-talk] part 3

joe harcz Comcast joeharcz at comcast.net
Tue Mar 29 23:43:48 UTC 2011


Part III:

6. No threat to the welfare of the blind people of our land is more urgent, and no peril more prominent, than the current frontal attack upon their independent
program of public assistance (title X) set forth in the Administration proposal for a new joint category blanketing the blind, the aged and the disabled.
I need hardly emphasize to you how distinct and specialized are the welfare problems of the blind from those of the other aided groups. They are vastly
different in point of fact; they are recognized as vastly different in point of law; they must be preserved in their difference and their autonomy if we
are not to lose by silent attrition what we have won through active struggle over the past two score of years.

The proposal for the new category (title XVI) is defended mainly, if not solely, on grounds of administrative uniformity and simplicity. No doubt that is
a value worthy of consideration. But who will maintain that it is the fundamental value to be advanced by these programs? Whatever became of the recipient?
Is his convenience not to be weighed against the convenience of administrators? It is in other fields. No doubt it would greatly simplify the administration
of justice if all law-breakers were to be treated and sentenced alike; but I hear no one proposing such a reform on the grounds of bureaucratic convenience.
No doubt the administration of the public schools would be eased in its burden if all students were to be graded alike; but the goals of education and
the interests of the students would be the losers. In the same way the objectives of self-support and self-sufficiency, of independent living and personal
rehabilitation, clearly demand the preservation--not the dissolution--of the realistic distinctions between aided groups now erected by the public assistance
programs.

There is, moreover, a deeper confusion involved in this issue: the confusion fostered by those who seek to abolish the system of categories altogether.
This across-the-board opposition to categories as such is not just impractical but nonsensical. Our laws are not, and cannot be, universal in their effect;
they deal with particular groups or categories of people, classified according to the limited purposes of the law. So long as there are laws and administration
of the laws--so long, that is, as there are people In their irreducible human variety and difference--there will continue to be classification of them
into categories. The question, in short, can never be whether to have categories, but rather which categories are legitimate and proper. In other words,
where are the lines correctly to be drawn?

The answer to this question is to be found by looking, first, at the purposes of public assistance with respect to its various clients and, second, at the
actual needs and circumstances of these client groups. One overriding purpose is common to all of the four existing categories: namely, to relieve the
distress of poverty through a program of income maintenance. And there is some overlapping and intermingling of other purposes, such as self-care, medical
aid and rehabilitation. But when we take a closer look at the groups involved, the similarities are seen to be less significant and less striking than
the differences among them. Children are not included in the category because their needs are different from those of adults. It would be ludicrous to
cast their lot with, say, the recipients of Old Age Assistance. It is hardly less ludicrous to cast the lot of the blind together with the aged and with
the permanently and totally disabled. Indeed, what the blind client in his productive years most needs from welfare is the kind of consideration that will
set him apart from those who are past retirement and those whose disabilities are total. What he needs, as they do not, is first of all the provision of
training and of opportunity for normal competitive life and livelihood. Perhaps the most tragic consequence of this new categorizing of the blind with
the mentally lame and the chronically halt is that these paramount and distinctive characteristics of many of blind persons--that they are able-bodied
and able-minded, normal in capacity and self-sufficient in potential--is categorically denied and overridden.

Not long ago some experts in social work published a study entitled "Public Welfare: Time for a Change," which made the familiar argument for the abolishment
of categories. But at the same time, without quite meaning to, the authors graphically exposed in a single phrase one of the main reasons for the necessary
distinction between categories. They called attention to the process of "selective limitation" by which public welfare measures, in their inception, come
to focus "around certain groups in the population whose claim to social protection is transparently obvious, most typically children or persons with particularly
anxiety-provoking disabilities such as blindness, leprosy, or insanity," What a forceful reminder this is of the social and psychological associations
which blindness carries in its train—of the timeword tendency to regard the blind as pariahs or mental defectives, to be put away somewhere out of sight
in sheltered retreats where the anxiety-provoking effects of their presence might be reduced to a minimum. Not long ago, in point of historical fact, the
blind shared their classic retreat with lunatics, if not with lepers. In the era of the almshouse and the work farm, there was in essence only a single
category of welfare recipient: that of the unfortunate. It may well be said that social progress for the blind began on the day when they were first recognized,
for purposes of welfare aid, as a separate category. Once accepted on their own terms, their problem came to be seen for what it is in fact: one primarily
of rehabilitation and retraining, of return to normal life and of reintegration into competitive society.

7. The threat of impending dissolution of the separate program of Aid to the Blind is not the only peril that has been posed by the public welfare package
of the New Frontier. Another is summed up in the single key word which provides the theme for the whole program. That word is "services." The accent in
welfare, said the President in February, must be on "services instead of support." And this point has since been hammered home deliberately and unmistakably
by the Secretary of HEW and his staff of experts.

The term "services" has been made to cover a multitude of virtues-but its fundamental meaning is clear. It means simply the services of individualized casework,
such as those of diagnosis, counseling, adjustment, psychiatric aid, and the like. These services have, of course, undisputed value in assisting individuals
and families to solve their emotional problems and to make constructive psychological and social adjustments. Where the significant causes underlying dependency
and need are of such a character, requiring informed guidance and therapeutic counseling, casework services are important and appropriate.

But it should be no less plain that where the root causes of poverty and dependency lie outside rather than within the person--where they are not psychological
in origin but broadly economic and sociological--the services of individual casework, however expert, are far from adequate. When an individual or a family
is in need not through such causes as alcoholism or emotional imbalance but because they are the victims of prejudice, of lack of opportunity, of unusable
skills, of regional unemployment or other environmental causes, the help they need most is of a wholly different order from that which casework services
can provide.

Indeed, it is not too much to say that the conventional services of casework, misapplied to such instances of hard physical and economic want, may often
be negative and even actively destructive in their effect. What is the value of orientation and adjustment services for the victim of discrimination who
cannot find work? Is it to teach him resignation and submission to a role of permanent inferiority and second-class status? And what of the young blind
person who finds himself the victim of a similar (if less blatant) discrimination? Is he to be adjusted to an acceptance of the sheltered workshop as his
predestined fate?

Let us have done with reckless talk of "services instead of support." Let us above all cease the gibberish of supposing (as Secretary Rlbicoff for one has
done) that all the vast and deep dislocations of society and the economy are now to be remedied by the "professional, skilled services" of social casework.
They are not. Many of those problems are beyond the scope and power of public welfare to alleviate. Others do lie within the scope of welfare--but only
as it evolves beyond the traditional boundaries of casework to implement the high objectives of self-support and rehabilitation, of independence and integration,
which are part and parcel of the progressive concept of welfare in the modern world.

8. If there is a threat to welfare in the beguiling phrase "services instead of support," there is a similar and equal danger in that other phrase of the
new program: "rehabilitation instead of relief." No one would oppose a mere stress upon rehabilitation rather than relief alone--if that rehabilitation
is vocational and not merely therapeutic. But why rehabilitation "instead of" relief? And why, for that matter, services "instead of" support? It is hard
to avoid the suspicion that the original and primary purposes of public assistance--to relieve the distress of poverty and to support those handicapped
or incapacitated--are here in grave danger of neglect if not extinction. At best, what these official phrases convey is a de-emphasis of the values of
relief and support--which means a devaluation of the cash grant. They do so, moreover, at a time when the principle of a money payment, the unrestricted
cash grant, is in urgent need of more rather than less encouragement--at a time when the pressures are mounting to garnishee and whittle away the public
assistance check and substitute for it the humiliating systera of the voucher.

What has become known as the principle of "adequacy"--that the money grant should be both unrestricted and sufficient in amount to meet the stipulated needs
of the recipient--is eternally under fire from the penny-wise and plain foolish. These are the people who are always engrossed in inventing and imposing
non-monetary services at the expense of adequate monetary support. Sad to say, they are joined by many in social work who tend to interpret the problems
of the needy (even that of hunger) in psychological terms, to be cured by services and yet more services.

The greatest and most glaring weakness of our welfare system is still that of its level of payments--a failure which cannot be compensated for by any amount
of "services," however professional or delightful they may be. This fundamental fact has been given renewed emphasis in a recent authoritative report of
the Project on Public Services for Families and Children, carried out by some of the most eminent personages in social welfare and based on a survey of
hundreds of workers and administrators across the country. The authors write:

"The material suggested that however important additional services might be, such services could not correct a deficiency created by the fact of providing
payments below the standards of health and decency. A social work educator spoke to this point:'... The prime necessity, I believe, is adequacy. Substitution
of services, the necessity for which arises often because of inadequacy of money, is to my mind destructive of basic family rights as well as responsibilities....
I think we do not yet know what families could do for themselves if they were not struggling under some of the dire consequences of our inadequate grants.'
"

What a vicious circle this suggests--with the client caught helplessly in the vortex. It is not only that the services of casework, inadequate in the first
place to meet the underlying problem, tend to call out more services and ever more services, without touching the real problem. That is bad enough and
sad enough. But the evil is further compounded by the fact that the cash grant may itself come with strings attached--tied in with the acceptance of services
which in turn control the amount of the grant and even the manner in which it is spent. In short, the threat of services is not simply that they may supplant
the basic requirement of adequate financial aid--but that they may condition and regulate it.

9. We have observed that the threat of services is, on one side, the threat of further invasion of the rights of clients--notably the right to do with their
money as they will--along with a denial of their capacity to act responsibly in their own best interests. This brings us to our next peril and problem
facing the blind: the challenge of those who would lead our lives for us--who would, if they could, not only do for us but speak for us and even think
for us. In more familiar terms, I am referring to the problem of custodialism.

It is this custodial bias which has led so many of the agencies to oppose with might and main the right of the blind to organize independently and to be
consulted collectively. It is this vested interest which leads the agencies, now as ever, to oppose the independent ownership of vending stands by their
blind operators--thereby lessening the supervisory control of the licensing agency. It is this caretaker mentality which leads the lighthouse keepers to
perpetuate the rotting institution of the sheltered workshop, to oppose organization and collective bargaining by its inmates, to break their strikes and
turn aside their pleas.

To an extent , one may even sympathize with the colonial custodians of the blind. What they face, all across the land, is nothing less than a revolution
of rising expectations. The blind people of America are not content with servile states; theirs is a full-fledged independence movement. Their demand is
for total equality--equality at the bargaining table, equality in the consultation room, equality in the market place. When the satraps of the agencies
are prepared to meet those democratic terms--when they are ready to work with the blind, not on them.--the challenge of custodialism will be ended.

10. The last of the threats to the welfare of the blind is by no means the least. In many ways it is the gravest of all. It is the self-challenge of our
own division and dissension--the internal peril of palsy and paralysis. Movements, too, have their diseases. And the worst of these, the one most often
fatal, is the virus of creeping anarchy--the blight of disunity and discord which gnaws at the vitals of a stricken movement until its will is sapped,
its strength drained away, its moral fiber shattered. The movement of the organized blind--we all know to our sorrow--has been so afflicted. If our movement
is to rise again, there must be among us a massive recovery of the will to live: a revival of the sense of purpose and mission, indeed of manifest destiny,
which once infused this Federation and fired its forward advance.

If we fail in that, more than a movement dies. The Federation has been, above all things, a repository of faith--the faith of tens of thousands without
sight and otherwise without a voice. It has become a symbol, a living proof, of the collective rationality and responsibility of blind men and women--of
their capacity to think and move and speak for themselves, to be self-activated, self-disciplined and self-governing: in a word, to be normal. Our failure
is the death of that idea. Our success is the vindication of that faith.

It is not enough to know that the Federation will endure. What is essential is that it shall prevail: that the claim of the blind to normality, their will
to equality, their drive for security, and their collective stride toward freedom, shall not perish from the land.
*************
Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out,
you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves. --Eugene Victor Debs
1855-1926

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