Exploration

I’m not sure which other story I intended to talk about this time. One of these days I will go back and pick up some threads. Yesterday I went to my first ODSP Support Group, and I want to say something about that right now.

When I originally heard about the ODSP Support Group, it was my intention to go for my own benefit. I wanted to (and still do!) share strategies and get the value of other people’s experience living this way. I also wanted and want to sustain my personal identity as a non-ablebodied individual (ie. a crip). (There is another story – my personal struggle to be seen and to know myself as both competent and non-ablebodied.)

Now I have also committed myself to keeping up this blog on a regular basis. It is my intention in doing this blog to highlight other people’s stories as well as my own. Going to the support group has taken on a research flavour. I am expecting that I will run into people who will be willing to share their perspective in this blog. At the same time, I must be cautious as quite naturally, people who are negotiating poverty as a way of life don’t necessarily want other people to know very much about their story.

When I arrived at the meeting there were three people present and another person arrived some time after me. One man clearly had the “chair” role and dominated the majority of the conversation. As the hour and a half unfolded it became clear that he has a WEALTH of resources and skills in a number of areas, from how to pull down TV signals that are being blocked from non-paying viewers to how to analyze the hidden agenda motivations of city and provincial politicians.

At first it was difficult to get a clear view of what the others’ contributions to the group were, mostly because they sat quietly while the Chair talked. But I am a patient person in some contexts and pretty good at asking questions that throw people into different social dynamics. Eventually other people began to speak up and share their experiences as well.

Oh my God, I’m hearing another story coming along. About ten minutes into the meeting I began to feel that old familiar feeling of excitement over the possibility of getting really involved in this group and steering its dynamics to a more democratic conversation. But, (damn it) I am plenty busy enough already and I am not going to take on yet another project!!!

So I took another persons phone number – he does not have enough income or social capacity to have a reliable internet source and his own email. I am hopeful that he and I will be able to create a page for this blog. His contributions about negotiating poverty were intriguing.

I got what I went for in a number of ways and I certainly intend to go back. Firstly I got some good ideas about how to get access to free food that is worth eating. Secondly I got a really good look at what the social and political landscape looks like to the people who use the ODSP benefit.
I want to write about food as a topic in my next blog entry. Right now what I want to say is how disabling I think it is that vulnerable and marginalized people so quickly adopt the agenda of fighting the system. Basically, for an hour and a half, I heard stories and commentary about a long and largely fruitless battle that people in Toronto have engaged with the city and with the province around the impact of their poverty.

Of course people need to fight back, or so it would seem. Somehow we imagine that those who created and run a system that leaves us busily scrambling for basics and daily managing the agenda of the system – we imagine that these people are simply ignorant of our situation and that if we tell them often enough and loudly enough and in as many ways as possible what we’re struggling with then they’ll fix it.

In my view it is clear that having us scramble IS the agenda of the system. The more we scramble the more the system is operating as it should. There is no end to the amount of begging and scrambling that the system desires. The more we do it the bigger it gets.

In my lifetime the poverty-inducing social service system has grown humungously, far outstripping the growth in population. It is a huge part of the Ontario and Canadian economy. Generating and managing poverty is what keeps hundreds and thousands of politicians, social service people and managers employed.

Another essential question for our society to answer if there is ever going to be a real reduction of poverty, or - God forbid – an END to poverty, we have to figure out what else these people, the bureaucrats, politicians and system managers, can do with their lives.

What is largely hidden from our own eyes is how gifted and skilled we are at living the way we do. It is my intention in this blog to highlight the many and valuable contributions that people who are labelled as “needy” are making to society. Some of the stories will be my own. Some will be from the people I meet along the way.

So far I have largely been setting the context. It’s a tricky part of this work because most readers will hear me as complaining. It is automatic to assume that people who need something are complaining. It is very difficult for us to hear ourselves or be heard as saying something that is a contribution. Largely, we have had no practice in speaking as valued citizens. Certainly no one has ever taught us or encouraged us to speak as valued citizens. If we were actually seen as valued citizens it would be impossible to sustain such a massive effort to help us.

Before I go any further I must make it clear that I am not advocating for abandonment. There is no such thing as a citizen who is not supported to participate. In other words, a fundamental purpose of what we call society is to provide the infrastructure that supports people to participate in the society. The citizen and his or her society are constantly in a dynamic relationship.

A valued citizen enjoys support which is transparent. This means that a citizen is continuously using support while virtually never noticing that she or he is using support. The person who jumps in a car, hops onto the freeway, arrives at work, turns the keys over to a valet, gets on an elevator to the fifteenth floor, turns on the internet and checks messages on a blackberry and asks her executive assistant to organize a meeting with lunch provided rarely thinks while doing all this that she is accessing the resources of at least eight or nine integrated support systems and the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands of people who sustain the roads, the car industry, the internet, the phone system, the employment system, the food distribution system, the elevators, the hydro-electric system, etc. She probably imagines herself to be a competent, independent-minded, creative multi-tasker.

A chief characteristic of support systems that service valued citizens is that the citizen can forget that the system is there. Participation is hindered when the participant has to manage the system. Remember what happens when your favourite freeway is blocked by construction and you have to start renegotiating your trajectory, your timing and your temper.

The “support system” built around the “needy” is designed to be constantly in the face of the user with no transparency or invisibility. The user of the poverty system is encouraged in every possible way from the carrot to the stick, to participate in managing the system. The obvious result is the person’s participation in creating society is eliminated or nearly so. The invention of “neediness” eliminates democracy.

Support systems for valued citizens can be highly individualized. The issue is not that so called needy people have odd characteristics that don’t easily fit into regular life. It is not really an issue that somebody who has seizures or who uses a wheelchair or sees and hears things that other people don’t is “odd” and may require very personalized support in order to participate. Executives of multi-national corporations have lots of minute by minute personalized support on top of the background of society-wide support. The issue is that our society is not set up for full participation.

Our society designed to limit full participation to approximately fifteen percent of the population. This means that there must be a justification for minimizing the participation of eighty-five percent of the population.

The invention of neediness has taken hundreds of years to unfold. Who knows how long it will take to invent something else – something we can call genuine democracy!

My commitment is to continuously put forward that all people contribute to society and would do so much better if we were properly supported as valued citizens. Currently poor people are contributing as poor people, spending hours and hours everyday supporting the jobs of the people in the service industry. Most of the time we add to that contribution by creating advocacy groups and “fighting the system.” I believe that it is important for us to minimize the fighting and take that time and energy to discover our own giftedness and to imagine ourselves as the valued citizens that we actually are.
Only then, I believe, will we actually be able to shift the society into the democratic future we all so richly deserve.

Judith