NASW Social Action/Social Justice Council

"Working to ensure quality, affordable health care for all Californians." AARP's radio slogan reminds me of Cynthia Smith, a client whom I met a few years ago when I was working in caregiver support. (I've appropriately concealed her real name.) Her dilemma will sound familiar; she and her mother had hit the "doughnut hole" in their Medicare Part D plan, triggering a drastic jump in the price of their medications; The cost of their drugs had pressed Cynthia into cutting prescribed dosages in half and paring down her purchases of other essential items.

The Social Action Social Justice Council appreciates
Dr. Kelly’s invitation to comment on “Rolling up My Sleeves”
(NASW News, July, 2008)

His statement is available at:
http://www.socialworkers.org/pubs/news/2008/07/kelly.asp


Dr. Kelly’s statement confines its mention of oppressed groups to veterans.  We support aiding veterans, particularly because recruiters systematically enlist poorly educated young people and ethnic minorities from marginal areas of the country. But we could all easily identify other groups in critical need of our expanded role.  For example, the number of our country’s incarcerated has climbed to the highest figure in the world, both in per capita and absolute numbers.  In February the Washington Post observed that one in 100 adults in the United States is currently imprisoned, an all-time high costing government tens of billions of dollars.  The article also notes that a disproportionate number of these inmates are minorities.  We live in a country where the state incarcerates people of color disproportionately, punishes children like adults, and forces women to give birth in prisons.  These facts reflect our politicians’ harsh, impractical, and ultimately disastrous “tough on crime” posturing.

Veterans are now the most politically innocuous group to support because our country has become deeply militarized.  The federal government devotes some 60 percent of its discretionary spending to the military, paying out more than all other nations on earth, friend and foe combined. Add to that the three trillion dollars-plus for the costs of the Iraq war and occupation, and the next administration—whoever it is--will be wearing budgetary handcuffs, even without financial bailout obligations.  We know the people left behind.  Frances Fox Piven’s The War at Home also examines the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars’ domestic damage.  Given this monumental problem, limiting our role to “helping the country to serve its veterans” diminishes us and denies our historical calling as advocates of peace.

Another specific strategy point, positioning our profession “to face global realities,” is hard to interpret, perhaps because “global realities” is so all-encompassing.  To “face them” seems to suggest passively accommodating them, whatever they may be.  Our concern with the international dimension of social work prompts us to request clarification.