I am old enough to straddle two eras in American society: The one we live in now when words like “wellness,” “self-care,” “equity” and “recovery” are part of popular jargon; and a bygone one when many of the social services that have become almost an expectation in our society were nonexistent.
My late father occasionally drove my brother and me past a foreboding brick building atop a hill outside Casper, Wyo., where, he said, the orphans lived. He didn’t tell us much more except to say the big building’s inhabitants were kids our age.
I remember bouncing along on the back seat wondering how the kids ended up on top of the hill and what would happen to them. As I got a little older, I started to understand the object lesson my dad was trying to teach us on our drive past the orphanage: There were two places for people who couldn’t get along on their own in society — with their families or in the wards and corridors of institutions like the big building on the hill.
In the era when I went to school, there were no special-needs classes or individualized education plans, and no residential placements for students like Danny, a small, completely non-verbal kid I knew.
Danny and kids like him sat at the back of a class that typically had at least 30, more like 40, kids. The teacher occasionally called on them, and if they didn’t reply, or muttered an incoherent answer, a couple of kids snickered, and the teacher moved on with the lesson.
I’ve met people who grew up in big Lynn families with aunts disfigured by polio, who spent their entire lives in their birth homes and uncles whose short lives included periodic stints on Tower Hill — a euphemism for what passed for alcoholism treatment 70 years ago in the old Convalescent Home.
One of my most memorable interviews was with a deaf man who recounted how he was misdiagnosed as mentally ill and confined to Danvers State Hospital with its locked wards, labyrinthian corridors, and Gothic towers.
He was living in a group home for the deaf when I interviewed him and he looked back on his institutionalization and what, at times, must have been a hellish experience, with tough-minded nonchalance.
The social services that underpin our society today, and that are being tested and strained by COVID-19, evolved from the classrooms I sat in and the institutions where people were warehoused.
The social-services network or safety net — call it what you will — provides hope and help for people who were dismissed from society or consigned to its dark corners: Kids like my friend Danny who were labeled “stupid” and the deaf guy I interviewed who was labeled “crazy.”
Our nation’s social services benefit all of us, not just the people who need help. Mental-health care is at the forefront of public awareness, thanks to social-service programs. Alcoholism and addiction are viewed as diseases because the people helping alcoholics and addicts have also educated the rest of us. Hardworking aides and specialists assigned to schools can spot and help a kid like Danny at an early age.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, with the swing-vote power he wields, would have us believe that supporting his fellow Democrats’ Build Back Better plan isn’t a sound fiscal policy.
Never mind the cornerstone affordable health-care and child-care provisions in the bill; in Manchin’s view, it’s time to tamp down the spending, and we can all tough it out. If you can’t afford day care for your children or home care for your aged mother and father or quality health care . . . Hey, we all got along just fine 50, 60, 70 years ago — remember?
