The Vulnerability to Terrorism: Impact on What is Core to Social Work

There is more to the collapse of the World Trade Center than the horrific deaths of 3,000 people, as if that weren't enough.

Our country has been engaged in a very long term struggle about whether to be open and supportive to people struggling to make ends meet, including access to good schools, health care, economic opportunities, and social services. In many ways it has been a struggle between the haves and the have nots, going back to the American revolution. It has been a struggle between (more or less) progressive and conservative forces in politics. It has also been a struggle for social work.

History of Struggle

In response to the Great Depression of the 1930's, major social programs were started, including Social Security. Some of these expanded through the 1950's, and further growth took place in the 1960's. This included the enactment of Medicare, Medicaid and numerous anti-poverty programs. It was not easy to get these programs off and running; there were enormous forces aligned against these efforts, and they have not gone away.

When I entered social work as a student in 1978, I sensed an anticipation that further expansion would take place in strengthening the social safety net despite the 70's having been relatively conservative under the administrations of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. (Carter did initiate a large public employment program but it did not survive through his successor's first term in office.)

Even though there were various forms of growth and increases in spending in social welfare in the 1980's, huge budget deficits run up during the Reagan years, resulting from tax cuts and massive increases in military spending, set the parameters for limiting the human services sector. Part of the strategy of the Reagan administration was to use the decreased availability of funding to squeeze many social programs.

Optimism, Quality, and Money

The optimism for further growth that I sensed when I graduated was never realized in terms of achieving the quality of services needed to be really helpful. Social workers continuously struggled with bare bones budgets and cutbacks throughout the period, even in New York State where we had an ideologically progressive Governor in Mario Cuomo.

Mr. Cuomo cut state taxes at a more aggressive rate than Ronald Reagan, especially for the business sector, leaving the state chronically short of the revenue it needed for services. In this particular way he turned out to be more conservative than the leading conservative in the country. Subsequently, Governor Pataki expanded on the trend of forgoing potential revenue for services through further tax cuts.

In the 1990's we saw a more conservative sweep into power at the Congressional level, billed as the "Contract with America", led by Newt Gingrich, fueled by the so-called "Christian Coalition".

One of the extraordinary recommendations coming out of this, connected to a continuous vilification of women on welfare, was to place children in orphanages. It was assumed that the government could better raise children than their mothers. Social workers were also vilified as being responsible for failed social problems.

While some of the worst proposals could not get enacted with a Democrat in the White House, including privatizing Social Security and seriously cutting Medicare, President Clinton did agree to end welfare as an entitlement program. He capitulated with the conservatives in dismantling a core program first enacted along with Social Security 60 years earlier.

The hopeful development in the late 1990's was the elimination of the long standing federal deficit from the Reagan era and the emergence of a budget surpluses forecast through 2010. For social workers the prospect of available funds gave rise to envisioning new opportunities for addressing child and family well-being and a more equitable distribution of resources. Such visions were short lived.

With George W. Bush being selected by the U.S. Supreme Court to be President, one of his first acts was to get Congress to go along with his proposal for the most massive tax cut in history, favoring the wealthiest 1% in the country with most of the benefits. With it went the projected surplus.

One Breath Away

The only thing standing between a completely conservative U.S. government was the defection of a Republican Senator from Vermont to being an Independent, giving the Democrats a one seat majority in the Senate. Every idea floating around in the past 10 to 20 years to gut health and human services and turn the calendar back to the era before the Great Depression of the 30's was just one breath away from being realized. This makes the next Congressional election in November, 2002 critical.

This is where we were on September 11.

While New Yorkers have been consumed by the need to get out from under the collapse of the Twin Towers, both literally and figuratively, the events transpiring at the national level and on the world stage will prove challenging for a very long time to come. Social workers will feel this keenly.

When there is a national call to arms in order to protect our security, as we now have in the U.S., money flows in that direction, leaving even less for the programs we know to be vital to people's lives. Civil liberties are also curtailed beyond anything that we would ordinarily tolerate.

Enter a New Era

If politics can be seen as a contest between progressive and conservative forces, it would be an understatement to say that since the 1970's, conservative forces have been winning.

What is so troubling now, following September 11, is that the threat to people's lives creates a new set of conditions that bolsters the conservative cause. Even though we have been in a recession, a hundred thousand jobs have been lost in the New York area, and local and state government is running unprecedented deficits, tax increases will not be considered. While money pours into funding national security, policy makers at all levels of government take the stance that there is not much they can do to address service needs.

Following World War II, we entered the Cold War, lasting approximately 40 years through the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are those who say that the new era that we are in, relating to the threat of terrorism, will also be long lived.

This puts social workers in a terrible bind. Most of the country supports the need to fight terrorism and accept that it will be costly and requires sacrifice. Calls for investing further in services will be pitted against this.

Moving forward we are going to need to be very clear about these trends, lest we not fully understand why the programs that we are working in, and the people they are designed to help, are so hard pressed.

There will not be easy answers. But, by becoming aware of the connections between things, we are more likely to understand what is shaping the lives of our clients and of ourselves.

These are not easy times for anyone. And these will not be easy times for social workers. To be effective, whatever that might mean, will require the greatest possible commitment to why one became a social worker in the first place.