The Cure Is In ... Prevention?
Isn't it always that way? Waywardness can be solved by prevention. Once a mindset and a way of life has been succumbed to, accepted as the norm, despite its deleterious results, no amount of quick fixes and band-aid solutions, however well organized and intended, seem able to turn around the harm done.We see this in the way people abandon their responsibilities to themselves manifested in so many ways, from ignoring basic health requirements, and becoming a burden to the foundational public-universal health care institutions, to relinquishing their ability to support themselves and their families decently through gainful employment.
In a social-conscious society there seems always to be a minority that proves incapable or unwilling to take on the responsibility of looking after their most basic needs.
Not the groups that strive to succeed and fail repeatedly, despite their determination - for whom bad luck and circumstances play a major role in their failure. These people genuinely deserve a helping hand when needed, until they finally succeed at the task of representing themselves as independently useful members of society.
It's another group, an underclass of people who have surrendered their lives to mental and physical sloth. Whose condition still pricks at the collective conscience of a population seeing themselves living comfortably and who cannot abide the reality of a minority living in the shambles of poverty.
History has proven time and again that the human condition is easily suborned to the acceptance of assistance, resulting in a state of dependence and finally, entitlement.
Accepting the charity of others and in the process abandoning a sense of dignity and self-worth, those who become dependent upon society's hand-ups also nurse a sense of grievance against the unfairness of their lives. Welfare dependency does not seem to obligate those who live on the good graces of society to appreciation, but rather to ingratitude, and the feeling that they're as deserving as anyone else to the good things life has to offer.
Living in subsidized housing in a country whose socialized medical system ensures access to health care, where municipal social programs offer dental care and counselling, children are raised in less than optimum learning and self-esteem conditions. And the cycle perpetuates itself. The housing provided is never adequate and there is no personal obligation to treat it as one would private property.
We see this happening in inner-city ghettos where the working poor and welfare families eke out their dreary existence. We see this on Indian reserves where the initiative to become adequately self-sustaining and proud of one's capabilities has been slowly drained away through the dependency syndrome.
There was a time in the earlier part of the last century when no organized social and civic institutions existed to this same degree for the singular purpose of looking charitably to the needs of the under-privileged. Somehow they managed to get on, and some of their children raised themselves through sheer determination out of the mire of degraded poverty.
Trouble is, ignoring the problem and leaving people to fend for themselves didn't solve the problem society faces to support the needy among their communities. Since communities were always divided among those who managed their affairs and those incapable of providing for themselves, there are no assurances that people, left to their own devices of incapacity can improve their situations.
There is then, no prevention. A minority of individuals will always present themselves to society at large as potentials-never-realized. All men may indeed be created equal, but in the final analysis equal opportunities and equality of disposition and genetic inheritance predispose against equality.
Labels: Social-Cultural Deviations, That's Life
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 20, 2008
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