A Hair’s Breadth

The simple facts of vulnerability and safeguarding seem to keep presenting themselves in the world, perhaps so we can learn what we need to from them about being of service to others. The explosions and death and terror caused by people towards people reminds me of the fragility of life, the thin line between everyday lives and chaos, and the seeming randomness with which those we love can be struck down in a moment.

What protects us and shields us to any degree? What about people who are living on the margins, on the very edges of society, people for whom things can go very badly, very quickly? I am thinking this morning of that young man – Robert Saylor- who was in Regal Cinema Theater #16 in Frederick, Maryland on January 12, 2013. He was 26 years old, had watched and apparently enjoyed the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”, and wanted to see it again. A movie theater employee called mall security, which consisted of three off-duty policemen (not in uniform), moonlighting as mall security guards. Mr. Saylor, who had Down Syndrome, was handcuffed as they tried to forcibly remove him from the theater. The scuffle that ensued resulted in Mr. Saylor being held facedown on the floor while handcuffed, and he was soon dead by suffocation. Observers state that before he died, he cried out for his mother. Blame has spread far and wide – lack of education for security officers, police mindsets, predjudice against of people with disabilities, lack of awareness of physical vulnerabilities of people with Down Syndrome, and more.

What I have heard may be true, and even if it is not completely true, it matters as we try to figure out how a chain of events like this could occur. It is said that Mr. Saylor was accompanied to that movie by a service worker. It is also said that, when it became clear that he was not leaving the movie theater, she decided to give him some time while she went to retrieve the car to pick him up in the front of the theater. By the time she had come back, it was too late. I can read some details into this scenario. I can read that Mr. Saylor had done similar things before – he doesn’t like to leave when he is having a good time. I imagine that she knew him pretty well, and knew giving him some time and space would be helpful. At some point, she may well have simply bought two $11.00 movie tickets and sat down for another round of Zero Dark Thirty, had she had the chance.

At some point, she walked through the lobby of the theater, and for whatever reason, did not to mention to any theater employees that Mr. Saylor was still in the theater, that he was waiting there until she came back, and that she would indeed be back in a few minutes. Perhaps she thought of this, and decided against it. On another day, she might decided differently. Perhaps if there had been a welcoming face on her way out, she would have, perhaps not. Had she, though, things would, in all likelihood, have turned out differently, and perhaps the Saylor family would not be grieving the death of their 26 year old son.

No blame intended from me – what lays me low is the realization of the hair’s breadth that separates people with disabilities and other devalued conditions from disaster. When we decide to walk with such people, we carry a responsibility of knowing that each and every action we take in that person’s life has exponential weight in terms of the consequences. Those consequences will be born quite heavily by the people we are in service to, and perhaps never even be noted or appreciated by those of us in service to them. This calls us to be wide awake and aware of the seriousness of the roles we have in the lives of the people we serve and are walking with.

All the policies and protections and laws and rules that many of us have to contend with can indeed provide important frameworks for protecting and safeguarding those with fragile lives and shaky life circumstances. However, acute personal awareness of what we actually DO in the lives of others moment to moment, and how these actions may impact the people we are serving adds a layer of safeguarding that is fallible and itself uncertain, but powerful and potentially life-saving.

A Seasoned Mind

Curiosity is a hard commodity to come by these days.  Many of us seem to be backed into our respective corners, surrounding ourselves with like-minded people, and reinforcing our own positions on most everything. I have noticed this in myself, increasingly, as I seem to harden in my positions on most everything. Maybe this is a function of age, but maybe it is also a function of the “the age” in which we live, or some combination of the two.  Having two teenagers in the house is teaching me important but irritating lessons about learning to hold my tongue and listen, even when my response just wants to burst out mid-(someone else’s) sentence.

There is value in being quiet when your inner voice is clamoring to be let out. One of the benefits is that sometimes you then get another chance to be heard later, and your reaction is more “hearable”.  Reflecting on what I have heard often gives me a chance to discern more clearly what is being communicated, and adapt and connect what is being said to other ideas I may have.

This is a hard practice for me – but I have there are two places I look to for wisdom and strength in this.  One is from my Quaker faith tradition.  A practice often used  is the ”seasoning” of ideas.  If a new idea or perspective is brought before the community, the members will rarely act upon that idea with immediacy – they will instead “season” it by a number of methods – perhaps ask a group of people to look into it, perhaps reflect in silence on it, perhaps agree to read something related to it, perhaps arrange an educational session, or just simply agree to let the idea “sit” for awhile amongst us to see what happens to it.  Will it grow and gain steam, or will it lose heft, as some ideas should?

A second place I can look to is the teaching tradition within the Social Role Valorization leadership practices.  The are many facets to development as an educator in “SRV” which are consciously taught, role modeled and practiced repeatedly.  One specific area which Dr. Wolfensberger and his colleagues have focused on in developing trainers about is how to respond to questions posed during a workshop. Many presenters, myself especially, tend to feel pressured to give a comprehensive answer right away and fully satisfy the questioner. My mentors have advised and worked with me to wait, to collect myself, to listen fully to the question, and to listen for “the question behind the question”.  I love that last skill especially, and work on it consciously. Then, stop and breathe, consider what the audience has been exposed to so far, think through what they will get in the up-coming material, and respond with clarity about what points you will make. That’s a big task for me, and good for me as well. 

All of this is to say that, if we want things to change for vulnerable people, we all have to see outside the boundaries of our collectivities and ideological groups, no matter how dear they are to us.  In fact, if change agentry is what we are about, then we are expecting others to engage in flexible thinking that shifts and opens their minds to a larger picture.  My teens will appreciate it if I can master this a bit more in 2013.  Perhaps they will respond in kind.

Wishing you all a 2013 in which you prosper and thrive in all the ways that count, along with those you love and care about.

I am only one, …

I am only one, but I still am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.

Helen Keller

This quote moves me this morning, as I prepare for my day with a bit of stillness and reflection. I need respite away from from hard and bitter images of carefree and precious 6 year olds who have lost their lives at the hands of another, and the families who have lost beloved sons and daughters, and the often angry, frightened words of our citizenry, struggling to understand and assure each other that this will not happen again.

Identification is heart work. It is also hard work. It involves going beyond simply putting oneself in the shoes of another, but actually trying to be as an extension of that other. In a world that separates and categorizes, a society that makes sense of who we are by making it clear who we aren’t, it is a hard task at times. Many people are flailing at answers – what can we do now, who can we blame. I am doing the same. Many people have taken strong positions on specifics – more funding for mental health services, more police in schools, more prisons, more stringent gun control. I am hesitating, on purpose, at this time in my life. Helen Keller’s words strike me as ones I need to pay attention to. Anger, fear, rage, and blame, and most of all a sense that a threshold has been crossed in our country. One that we will respond to as a people, hopefully in the fullness of the wisdom and depth that resides in each of us, and is empowered and activated when we work together.

I am spending time today reconnecting with people in my life with whom my connection and bonds have weakened, because of distance, time, and, mostly, the pull of a busy and demanding lifestyle. Part of what feels true to me at this time is that we live in a society where we must connect with each other and strengthen our commitment to protect, serve, safeguard, and attend to each other in a strong way.

It seems like our society is held together by increasingly fragile human bonds. Where alienation from each other, lack of identification with others, and huge pressures to buy into (literally) a materialistic, impersonal value set which makes us all come up empty time and time again, no matter how much we spend, we buy, we own, we eat, we watch, we earn. We keep coming up empty and disconnected from each other. Perhaps that makes for a society where people do horrific, inconceivable things. Horrific acts then lead a fearful, disconnected citizenry to demand that we, for example, arm our teachers, pre-empt violence with violence, retreat into our smallest circles of allies, and maybe hide from each other. I worry about how this will impact and implicate the already marginalized. This week, I will re-connect with some people who I have drifted away from, and will widen my circles, at least a little. That I can do.

Best wishes to you all for holidays that bring us together, cause us to celebrate each other, and take comfort in knowing and seeing that there is much good in the world, and in human beings.

Service in the Long Hall

“Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth. It is the very purpose of life, not something you do in your spare time.”

- Shirley Chisholm (passionate activist, educator, and groundbreaker who was the first African-American citizen to run for President of the United States…in 1972, by the way)

These words have got me thinking about the nature and meaning of service. It can mean everything from the vocations we pursue (customer service, human service, landscape service, mail service) to the voluntary giving of oneself in support of another.

In fact, even the idea of “volunteerism” can be broken down into types of service – one may serve an organization (like a library, museum, or service agency) or one may serve an individual or a family in a personalistic way. It is this deeply personal idea of serving upon another person which is driving my thinking today, as I offer myself to my favorite and only Aunt Lou in a time of great vulnerability.

At the moment, she is recovering from a stroke and a series of difficult situations, and is staying in a nursing home for 10 days as her family plans for her return home. My Aunt Lou is a woman who simply will not be institutionalized in her mind, or her body. This makes her particularly at risk as she simply will not “get with the program” . Because we know and love Aunt Lou, we also know she needs to be safeguarded night and day, and have done so.

I had this heartbreakingly poignant moment with her yesterday. As is often the case with human service environments, there is a strong staff culture at the nursing home where she is staying. Day and night, there is a lot of friendly talk, laughing and joking amongst the nurses, aides, social workers and others. Some of the people who are living in the nursing home seem to enjoy the repartee, and try to be a part of it. It mostly seems to annoy and confuse my Aunt Lou, who looks at me with a knowing hard look when it happens.

When visitors come, she will say, “You will not believe what has happened to me”. This is no small talk, either. The words are sometimes a long time coming, but with focus and time, they do come. The bells and buzzers and alarms and chatter are constant and terribly distracting to Aunt Lou. They also are frightening and foreign to her, and rob her of her competencies, because she cannot easily hear or attend.

She is intent on walking, and walk we did yesterday, as she regains her strength, works hard to get her bearings and struggles to understand how life went so bad so quickly for her. On the walk (as she calls it “down the lane”) down an endlessly long hallway and maze of confusing passages and doorways, we passed the busy and active nurse’s station. As is usually the situation, many people in wheelchairs encircle the perimeter, perhaps enjoying the staff-centered action that is happening in front of them.

Moving forward with determination, but so fragile at the moment, Aunt Lou tenses as the staff burst out in uproarious laughter. She takes a stagger step, which nearly upends us both. Whatever has happened, it is very, very amusing to those involved. The clustered onlookers laugh as well, but are not part of the joke, at least not fully, and they seem tentative.

A flash of confusion comes over my strong Aunt’s face, you can see it quickly changes to a more determined look as she puts her head down, bears down on her walker, and moves more quickly. The aide who is walking alongside us, in explanation, mentions that the joke is that one of the nurses just “broke wind”, although that is not the language she used. It is one of Aunt Lou’s euphemisms. As we keep moving, the uproar continues behind us.

The trip through the confusing, endless hallway continues, but something has changed. Aunt Lou seems somehow smaller, tentative, unsure of herself. We finally make it to a grouping of chairs and sit next to each other. She keeps glancing at me as if for reassurance. 20 minutes go by, and by now her hands are trembling. The words come out, eventually. She finally just had to ask. “Betsy, did I break wind?”

I was nearly overcome with empathy as I realized the impact that the scene at the nurse’s station had on my Aunt Lou.

What does it take to give personal, respectful service to another human being? Can it be done in group settings which require people to conform, and there are people in the role of “staff” who are trying as best they can to cope with a situation which is hard to bear? For me, if I am going to have a professional relationship with vulnerable people, it seems urgent for me to have some relationships with a few people over the long haul who live on the margins, and for whom I have no professional obligation to at all. Shirley Chisholm had great personal empathy for and identification with those at the bottom of the social ladder. I suspect she also had personal relationships which made her keenly aware of the need to stand beside and behind people.

My Aunt Lou has always been a powerful role model to me – she raised 6 children on her own, on a social worker’s salary, by the way. She is strong, capable, so smart, and like me, a rugged “horsewoman” and a strong Quaker. The things she is showing me now hurt, but it is the kind of hurt that will strengthen my ability to keep in focus the importance of personally being of service.

Writing the Book…..

I spent a few long days last week with some people who have experienced some pretty hard times, and seem to be still bearing a lot at the hands of society, and even, it seems, are more than a bit at the mercy of human services. It is hard to imagine how someone with the means and heart to help lift someone out of the “mental health client” role will arrive in someone’s life, given the amount of distance between the lives of people at the bottom of our social ladder and the lives of most other people. The people I met are all but invisible.

Part of my own process of reconciling my own responsibility in this is to remember the “levels of action” proposed within the Social Role Valorization – In short, this includes the idea that there are a number of levels on which we can respond to the problems that marginalized people face in society. We all would do well to engage in a process of discernment – where do our talents, gifts, and interests lie? In the realm of making change on the societal level? In the area of working with local communities and service systems to make a more responsive system? Walking with individual families and vulnerable people?

I don’t often have a clear idea about the answer to this for myself, but having a framework to keep thinking it all through helps me stay both clearer and truer. Whatever I choose to do – teach, write, identify with a person, keep and share someone’s story and history, bear witness, discover truths about someone, walk with someone through hardship – it all becomes immeasurably more important when we recall the title of a song – Elvis Costello, I think –  ”Every Day I Write the Book”. This raises the responsibilities for us all, to think, to base our actions and responses on a coherent set of ideas, and to realize that others are watching and learning from us. We should be mindful of the nature of the book we are writing.

A Teaching Moment

One of the richest parts of teaching Social Role Valorization is getting to witness a moment that often happens in the minds and experiences of the learners. That moment is a realization that the ideas we are teaching – about the universal phenomenon of social devaluation, the devastating consequences of it, and the most likely ways to address it in the lives of vulnerable people – are not prescriptive.

What I mean by this is the moment when people see that “SRV” does not tell them what they should and should not do, but instead gives them the knowledge of likely outcomes different measures might have.

Invariably, early on in the presentation, someone will say something along the lines of, “But what if the 50 year old man I serve likes to color with crayons, is that OK or not?” or “Should we never serve people in groups together with other vulnerable people?” People want to be told exactly what to do.

Of course, SRV theory contains no answers about that. It simply can give us information about what is LIKELY to happen IF that person colors with crayons, or IF ten people with disabilities are taken to the theater to see a movie all together.

Those are two very simple examples, but they illustrate the larger issue. That issue is… How we can create a sense that we ourselves can evaluate the likely impact of any number of measures we might be considering, and SRV theory informs that decision? In other words, if we understand how role expectancy, imagery, and heightened vulnerability interact and impact on the result when a vulnerable adult colors with crayons, we can decide ourselves how or if we might address that, but in any case, we have thought through the impacts, armed with knowledge and tools to really analyze the situation.

The moment when the SRV learner begins to see that they are not being told what to do (which most human service workers and families of vulnerable people and the people themselves experience A LOT), but instead are being given tools of analysis which allow them to use their minds, their creativity, and their own free will to see the possibilities – that is a special moment.

I saw that moment yesterday in the midst of teaching a four-day SRV workshop. We were about ½ of the way through the materials (2 days down, 2 to go) and you could almost feel people’s energy levels rise. You could feel a stirring in the room. Somehow, the people in the room seemed to come alive, to somehow get bigger, and to “get their intellectual and emotional selves in sync.” People began to see that they could connect the ideas we were exploring all together, in new ways, by themselves. When they discussed them and connected with other people, those ideas combined and became clearer and more powerful in yet new ways.

Now that is liberation. In a (human service) world where we have reduced so much to policies, checklists, rules, protocols, and standards, it is almost magical when we use our incredibly ingenious, flexible, capable minds and awaken ourselves to both thinking and feeling and weighing things out, bringing together multiple complex ideas. It is really an amazing thing to watch, and to get to play a part in. I can’t help but think that this kind of intellectual awakening will bear good fruit in the lives of the people we serve.

Being There

Last year, David stopped by my home to wish me a happy 47th birthday. He pulled right in the driveway, knocked on the door, and extended his wishes for me to my husband and my daughter. I was not expecting him, and was, as is often the situation, out of town. He only stayed a little while, but even hearing Thomas tell of his visit made me feel valued and honored.

David is a man who many would say has a disability – the kind of disability which people would assume makes him unable to connect closely to others in a social relationship. I see him a few times a year at events held by my Quaker meeting. One thing people know about David is that he remembers birthdays. Everyone’s birthdays. A little stereotypical, I know, but it is true.

He drove 90 minutes round trip to my home to wish me a happy birthday on October 22, 2011.

I always wanted to have a “drop-by” kind of home – where people feel welcome to stop by, drop in, and share my household and family life here and there. I experienced this for a little while when we lived in a more urban area, with lots of people close by and a “neighbor culture” where privacy had a lower value, and informal connection a greater value.

I loved not knowing who might be in my kitchen having a glass of wine or a chat with Thomas around the island in our kitchen. I loved pulling in the driveway at the end of the day, and being greeted by a few people sitting on the porch together, sharing and talking.

You make your choices, I guess. Nowadays, we live in the woods, nearly 45 minutes from any population center, in a neighborhood which deeply values privacy and immediate family ties. This makes my dream of a hub of activity, a buzz of community, centering in my home, unlikely and hard to create. Planning ahead and scheduling “drop-ins” is simply not the same.

These days, Facebook and its ilk seems to substitute for not only any and all personally delivered birthday wishes, but also for phone calls, letters, and, sometimes, actual contact between people both in time and space. David does not Facebook. I am glad. He reminds me that, sometimes, there is no substitute for being there. Truly being there.