Therapy, the multi-tentacled beast that spread in locust-like herds across the nation for 50 years ruining lives, splitting families, teaching nonsense and getting paid to do it, appears in remission.
Therapists were the driving wheel behind the satanic children sex abuse hysteria in the 1980s; therapists taught parents of Stranger Danger which, translated, instilled fear and loathing in children being kidnapped off the very streets where they lived. Not.
Therapists were all college graduates holding gaudy master’s degrees in a discipline that ought never have existed.
Therapists said they could determine if a five-year old had been sexually abused by studying the kid’s crayon drawing(s). Therapists posited the novel concept that if a suspected victim did not believe they’d been molested it counted as evidence the victim had been molested.
Therapists said teenage girls who wore baggy clothes did so because they’d been molested, thus ashamed of their bodies, and did not want to be viewed as sexually attractive. Therapists also said teenage girls who wore provocative clothing did so because they’d been molested and wanted to present themselves as sexually attractive.
Sins of the therapists were many and they continued full throttle in the 1990s and beyond, entrusted by courtroom judges to bring clarity and understanding to misbehaving teenage boys and girls. How many a New Age ninny in a granny dress, blasting aromatherapy fumes through her crystal-filled office, was hoping to find evidence her captive delinquent had been molested?
It has always been an inside game, therapy. More recently, the academic ruse has brought society to absurd practices regarding drug addiction. The solution, says the ever-progressive therapist, is to provide drug addicts with free hypodermic syringes to curb the stigma of drug addiction and open them up to a world of therapeutic tools to identify the emotional trigger points now forcing them to inject drugs into their bodies.
Suggesting drug addicts go cold turkey while living in tent cities 100 miles from Nowhere, Wyoming, would be contraindicated, as any therapist would say. Quitting drugs in such a setting could harm an addict’s self-esteem and sense of dignity. Better to ease off heroin as we might with any medicine, in a calm, nurturing environment under the guidance of specially trained therapists in quiet, darkened rooms lit by candles and with lots of pillows.
When the homeless issue came to a head in the 1990s therapists were happy to adjust their failed strategies in ending the problem, though the word “ending” was always uttered with a wink and a smirk.
A small number of guys once panhandled change outside Ukiah grocery stores or positioned themselves at freeway entrances with “Will Work for Food” signs also accompanied, it must be said, with winks and smirks.
But no, said the therapists, social workers and grant writers who sat at big tables in big rooms in nonprofit agencies, busy dreaming up slogans and fancy sounding programs. The first were ‘A Helping Hand, Not a Handout!” posters around town, and before we knew it those few beggars and small-change practitioners were supplanted by hundreds more homeless sorts, eager to get in on the government funded gravy train.
There’s big money in helping homeless people remain homeless while recruiting more homeless people to join them in a great big homeless funding machine.
It is forever thus: government money to bankroll big projects with names that promised, in the vaguest of terms, to bring solutions to the table. The “table” was the same one the therapy mob always sat around, and the “solutions” were lucrative longterm employment for people who were otherwise unemployable.
But now cracks appear in the well-oiled but indefensible scheme of funneling money to any program with a catchy name that purports to combat homelessness.
The spectacular multi-decade failures in giving nonprofit agencies unlimited funding without having to prove, or even attempt to prove, the success of one program vs. another is heading for much deserved termination.
There’s a new sheriff in town. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., may take a long look and a take a quick whiff at the billion upon billions of dollars shoveled at agencies resulting in homeless problems far worse than 30 years ago.
I’m sure some fresh thinking will bring a better way. It seems impossible to find a worse one.
(Tom Hine and his invisible sidekick, TWK, have relocated to North Carolina for an indefinite stay. Cry and wail and pray for their return. It might help.)
While it seems obvious that the bureaucratic institutionalization of Therapy has done little to alleviate the growing problem of homelessness, addiction, and various social ills, there are other more potent drivers of the situation at play. Like the present cost of housing and food. and the biblical reminder that “the poor will always be with us”. We now have an economic meltdown underway that is beginning to resemble a contemporary rerun of the 1930s, with the attendant historical woes repeating themselves. Or a least rhyming. Therapy was not a thing when John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ followed the Joads along the road to California.