this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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That's a band-aid on a broken leg: useless. Social workers and mental health professionals aren't going to help when the problem is poverty. What are they going to do, make you feel better about not being able to make rent, or getting your shitbox 20yo Toyota repo'd because your hours got cut and you couldn't make the payments? Fix the economics, and the rest largely solves itself.
That's where you're wrong. Both social workers and mental health professionals can ABSOLUTELY help you reach out to get the help you need and make you better equipped to deal with and change the system, leading to a reduction in poverty. It's less of a band-aid on a broken leg and more one small but extremely beneficial piece of a huge puzzle.
...And that's what's helping, not the social workers. Ain't nobody got time to be fighting for change when you're working 14 hour days just to be able to make rent.
So you want to preserve an injust system because that selfsame system is holding you down?
It's not the worst argument I've heard for maintaining the status quo, but it sure as hell isn't a good one..
That's a really weird take on what I said.
The social workers aren't directly addressing the problem. The social workers ensure that you don't have to work 14 hour days just to get by at a barely-outside-of-poverty level. Feeling better about yourself isn't going to mean that you don't have to work yourself to utter exhaustion just to get by.
The problem is the system we live in, the system that allows vast inequities in wealth, the system that requires poor and unemployed people in order to keep profitability high for owners. Reducing cops and adding social workers doesn't directly address that, and it's unlikely that it would indirectly address that either. Yes, we should fix our criminal justice system. Yes, people living in poverty should have realistic access to mental health. But that should be because it's the right thing to do, not because that's going to fix the underlying inequities that cause the problems.