The System

Blame the system...




There are many places where our welfare system fails. Most often it is in the area of prevention. For the destitute, for the single parent, for the mentally or physically handicapped the system does okay for the most part. The welfare system's adequacy allows us to escape any sense of responsibility to do more. The welfare system has assuaged our guilt, the voice within that says, "I should do something." The welfare system is comforting to more than just the needy. The people I'll call the "Condition Reds" are the ones I mentioned, but it's the "Condition Yellows" where the system falls flat on its face.

The system isn't really interested in offering help to the twenty-five year old Caucasian kid with a petty criminal record whose mother was an addict. I guess, there are no hero points awarded for this in the minds of many taxpayers. We will spend millions for munitions to prevent some twenty-five year old kid in Afghanistan from burning an American flag on his street, but the dollars go dry when it comes to preventing our neighborhood kids from meeting the same end as the Afghan kid in our own streets. It's a matter of priorities that don't go unnoticed by both kids.

Eventually, that condition yellow kid takes his petty crime resume into the big time, or in some other way expresses his frustration in violence towards the system that failed to care. That's where the system fails, and that is where the justice system becomes the only system that takes any interest in him.

The system which failed him, and probably his parents as well, is called, "community". It's the most overlooked and important first line of defense against poverty, child abuse, crime, and every other social ill that plagues us. Instead, we wait with our hands behind our backs looking on like spectators of a reality television show expecting someone else to take the initiative, to do something, to care. That's not our job, not our responsibility, we pay taxes to do that sort of thing, don't we? We will call 911 when we find the unfortunate kid overdosed in our alley. That's the beginning and the end of our part in the system, the system that failed.

We could have said, "Hey, kid, I'll pay you $20.00 a week if you cut my grass every Wednesday," or "Son, are you looking for work? I've got a friend who needs some landscaping done." or "I've got some leftovers in the fridge, are you hungry?" Instead, we stood with our hands behind our back with a finger on the 9 button of our cell phone when the kid turned corpse passed by our front yard yesterday.

I'm not saying that a seventy year old widow should invite anybody into their home, but this is for those of us who are capable and don't take their finger off the 9 button because we're afraid to get involved, because it's not our problem, because we paid our taxes, because we can't make a difference, because we don't believe that community is a verb.

Preventive medicine is far less costly than corrective medicine. We know this. Preventive maintenance is far less costly than corrective maintenance.  We know this. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We know this.  So, if we're so damn smart, why aren't we applying the prevention theory to our own community? Maybe dialing 911 is a lot easier than doing the work it takes to be a community... or maybe the kid isn't your problem. Your problem is dealing with all these damn corpses.