Before taking this class, I had almost no interest in advocacy and the idea kind of annoyed me, even though I knew it would be important for me to advocate for my future clients. Since being involved in the class this semester, I have started to develop a deeper understanding and interest in advocacy related topics. For one, I am looking forward to attending the advocacy day at the capital. I think it will be a great look into advocacy in action. This course has challenged me to keep updated on current events and to know what is happening in policy. Growing up, I have been so used to completely ignoring anything political going on, since it did not directly pertain to me.
Another thing that is interesting to me about policy is how if you look under the initial statement or claim that the press, media, or government make, there is usually something deeper going on underneath. In class we talked about Trump’s idea to give drug dealers the death penalty, and how his staff and colleagues sort of supported him in that, using guarded language. But, the reality behind that was that the law does not allow the death penalty for drug dealers who do not kill anyone.
Education policies are also something that interest me greatly. When I started college I was an education major, and a big reason why I left that major was because I couldn’t stand the laws and government influence in the system. I decided I would much rather help people on an individual level than have to deal with common core and school budget cuts. I have seen recently in the news and on Facebook a lot about teachers with run down classrooms that are falling apart. These teachers complain that they do not have supply budgets and have to spend their own money on copy paper in order to print off worksheets for their students. Teachers believe they shouldn’t have to worry about their budget crisis and should be focused on their students, and I have to agree. I think it is interesting and frustrating how we discuss in class how much of the United States budget is spent on the military. Even a small fraction of that budget would significantly help the education system in the United States. I am hoping that after all this uproar on social media, we start to see some better education policies written.
Yes, state and federal budgets are moral documents. They represents what we think is important. It’s true that state taxes such as sales and property taxes don’t fund the military, and none of the payroll taxes fund the military, but when it comes to the Federal Income Tax, about half of that is going to national defense, or, if you prefer the term Karl Marx used: “The Human Slaughter Industry.” Obviously we need some national defense spending and we need some persons to serve in the armed forces, and there are many noble and good persons in the military, but it is discouraging to read about American rockets and bombs killing innocent people in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and so forth, and likewise disheartening to read about the huge profits made by companies that produce and sell such weapons and encourage their use, or sell over-priced and low-quality equipment and material to the armed forces; meanwhile, as you point out, we have not invested adequately in schools. And, the media and our pervasive paranoid culture remain fascinated with “welfare cheats” and people who “abuse the system” by getting a few hundred dollars per month of food or rent subsidies that someone begrudges them. Meanwhile, we give contracts to timber and mining and ranching interests to pay the public mere pennies on the dollar for the resources they take from our commons (public land); we continue to subsidize unsustainable and unethical industrial farming, destructive fossil fuel consumption, and the prison-security industrial complex. Yet in the testimony about investing a few hundred thousand dollars to help young adults who have aged out of foster care to go to four-year colleges, many state representatives apologized (apparently sincerely) that there was “no money left” [sic] to fund such extravagances.
Humans brutalized by the system that squeezes them into conformist roles in making other people wealthy while supporting a parasitic leisure class of “creators” whose main contribution to society is raiding companies and stripping them of value and putting their workers into unemployment are shielded from the truth, and their wounds and disappointments and stresses make some of them susceptible to sadistic fantasies of “killing the brutes” (whether fantasizing about running your car over a Black Lives Matters protestor or actually committing genocide against plantation workers in the Belgian Congo, Europeans and European-Americans have an enduring ability to turn their own pain into the infliction of misery on others). The imagined spectacle of executions of drug dealers, or the heartless deportation of Americans who happened to be born abroad and arrive here as small children, or the the imposition of long prison sentences on poor persons who commit petty crimes (20 years incarceration a potential sentence for trafficking your SNAP benefits)—these are the fantasies of a people who are corrupted by an immoral system of exploitation and false competitive struggle. The work of our profession to change the culture and change the debate and encourage new priorities and more effective solutions to social problems is daunting but absolutely necessary.
The struggle to get people to see how immoral and inefficient and wasteful our current priorities and policies are is one that can be so challenging that we can get discouraged. But, it is not a hopeless struggle, and sometimes there are successes.
[The “killing the brutes” phrase is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, in which the insane Kurtz adds the phrase “exterminate all the brutes” to a report he has submitted to a group intent on the suppression of savage customs. And, if you read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost you will know that the Belgian administration in the Congo did kill millions of Africans, just as the fictional Kurtz recommended. My point is that people go mad in extreme conditions, and it is madness to fantasize about killing nonviolent protestors, just as it is madness to tolerate policies that kill innocent people, like a health care system that lets people die if they don’t have the money to pay for life-saving medicines or procedures that society could easily afford to provide, or a “defense” system that routinely kills innocent people thousands of miles away from us who are minding their own business and have no animosity toward us until our bombs (or the bombs of our so-called “friends”) smash up their homes and break the bodies of their friends and family.]
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