Good intentions? Or just trying to avoid confrontation.

Good intentions?  Or just trying to avoid confrontation. 

   

How often do we see someone show what appears to be an act of kindness or an extra consideration to one person, but it is at the expense of many others.  You might have seen them on the highway, dropping back to allow several cars crowd in ahead of them, and of you.  Or the shopper with the full grocery cart being allowed to sneak into the front of a long line while your feet are killing you.  My wife worked for the Seattle prosecutor's office preparing cases for court.  Her boss allowed two of her co-workers to come in an hour late because of poor bus connections.  But early mornings were when all the rush and crunch occured.  The slack had to be picked up by those who came in on time, making their job even more difficult. 

This hits home for me since it's a lesson I've had to learn over and over and over again.  It comes from my being a Rescuer.  It's what brings many of us into Social Service because we believe that if we just try real hard we can rescue everybody.  Even folks who don't want to be rescued.  I mean, just who do they think they are anyway? 

Being a Rescuer is a tough place to be when you are charged with running a rehabilitation training center for newly blinded people, on limited resources. 

Now at the same time, the Vocational Rehab Counselors were operating under the same limited resources.  So what they did was to push through folks who might have benefitted from our program but they could shove them into a job with a smile and a prayer, not to mention the savings of their budget dollars.  And who do you think they trotted up to our training program?  It was the folks they couldn't figure out what else to do with. 

"Fix them!" seemed to be the order of the day. 

And here I sat, the Rescuer, ready to charge in and do just that. 

It took me what seemed like forever to realize that spending extra time and staff energy with people who'd been through these sort of programs two, three and four times before, that they were not going to be rehabilitated no matter how much I wanted it. 

An observer once said to me, "Why do you think you can rehabilitate people who have never been habilitated in the first place?"  And of course these were many of the people the VRC's were bringing to us.  The people who had been sheltered, smothered and never allowed to explore their world. 

But I kept taking them in because I saw my program as their Court of Last Resort.  If we didn't rescue them, what would happen to them? 

It took me a long, hard struggle before I came to understand that all of the compassion I was pouring out to these people was at the expense of other folks who had come ready and eager to learn and move back into the work force.  And more than that, I was not helping the people I was so diligently trying to rescue.  I was merely providing them a place to live until they moved on to be rescued somewhere else. 

This brings me back to that supervisor who thought she was being kind to allow two employees to adjust their schedules.  Of course from our lofty position we can see that the only lesson they were learning was that they were not part of the team.  They were privilaged.  Naturally this had serious repercussions  .   

And what about those youngs blind children whose parents want to protect them and to ensure that they are kept safe from harm?  By not stepping back and allowing their children to experience life, with all of its bumps and bruises,

they are teaching the wrong lesson to those children. In truth, they are not only doing the child a grave disservice but also every person whose life will be impacted by that child. 

I think the best term I ever heard was, "Tough Love".  We need to stop trying to be the nice guy, or to rescue everybody, and realize that when we avoid confrontation we are simply passing the problem on to others. 

 

Curious Carl