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CHAPTER 2

Contextualizing the Helping Professions

Daniel Roth and William Roth

On September 11, 2001, four fully-fueled jet airliners changed course with the uncanny precision of cruise missiles. One fl ew into a tower of the World Trade Center. Soon after this incredible event, another jet liner crashed into the second tower of the World Trade Center, revealing that what might have been an accident was almost certainly a deliberate act. Then, a third aircraft exploded into the Pentagon. The fourth plane crashed in the countryside of Pennsylvania. These horrendous occurrences have come to be known as 9/11. They constitute a hinge on which our history pivoted. To state that this hinge has implications for the human services is to understate the obvi- ous. As shown in this book, these events have changed what constitutes a social problem, what the human services are, and the environments in which they work. The human services now need to think about the human world at multitudinous levels—including the national, transnational, regional, and global—with a recognition of their interactions. Further—along with more traditional subjects like poverty, inequality, oppression, human diversity, the abuse of women and children, grief and loss, education, health care, and trauma—the human services must consider such newer features as inter- national trade, currency fl ows, corporations, power violence, desperation, modernization, sustainable development, war, and terrorism.

New and different after the events of September 11 was the magnitude of the terrorism in the United States. There had been acts of terrorism here on a smaller scale, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the horrors in Oklahoma City. If the defi nition of the United States

Roth, W., & Briar-Lawson, K. (Eds.). (2011). Globalization, social justice, and the helping professions. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from liberty on 2021-10-18 21:44:18.

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26 Globalization, Social Justice and the Helping Professions

is expanded ever so slightly, we could include the bombing of the Ameri- can Embassy in Kenya. All these horrors were perpetrated against civilians, arguably an essential characteristic of terrorism. However, if we go beyond violence against civilians, we can include the attack on the USS Cole. To fi nd a precedent to 9/11, though, for such human destruction caused by human beings within the borders of the United States, we must turn back to our Civil War. Terrorism has existed elsewhere, as has violence, a broader term that includes terrorism. Examples of such violence proliferate: the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Rwanda, and Cambodia are but the beginnings of a long list stretching across the globe and back through history.

Yet, there were unique aspects to 9/11. We had become the world’s sole superpower, and the idea of such an attack was diffi cult to conceive. We had emerged from a long period of war, starting with World War II and fi nishing with the end of the Cold War. We were victorious not only in having won these wars, but with the exception of domestic espionage and, of course, Pearl Harbor, we also had been successful in taking full advantage of the vast Atlantic and Pacifi c Oceans that constitute our eastern and western borders. Thus, we were successful in keeping almost completely aloof from organized violence. Victorious without having to suffer the fi rsthand effects of war, we were particularly shocked by the events of September 11.

The big story of 9/11 concerns postindustrial society, one of whose consequences was arguably the globalization that concerns this book. Glo- balization, as that word was sometimes used, referred to the export of Ameri- can practices and policy to a waiting world. At a deeper level, globalization referred to interactions among corporations, banks, cultures, and countries across a world viewed through American-colored glasses. True enough, there were secret engagements throughout the globe. Ever since the Second World War, America had entered the world of violence and spooks, big time. Thus, we toppled the government of Guatemala, extended the colonial burden of the French in Viet Nam, armed and trained the Taliban in Afghanistan with the cooperation of Pakistan Intelligence, and engaged in other countless measures of realpolitik. Such actions often had unanticipated consequences, quaintly called “blowback” by the CIA (Johnson 2004). Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban exemplify blowback.

Myths

Let us be frank. The United States has done many things seemingly incon- sistent with our values. We have supported dictators and helped client states in wars. Historically, we have been involved in the removal of millions of Native Americans and in the exploitation of African Americans. However,

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27Contextualizing the Helping Professions

this record in no way justifi es the terror perpetrated on September 11. Let us also be clear about what did not happen. What happened was not merely a horrible act by an insane Osama Bin Laden. What happened was not a clash between Christianity and Islam, a modern-day repeat of the Crusades. What happened was not the action of stupid people. What happened, at least as an end, was not the hijacking of four planes.

We attend fi rst to the hijacking. Long after the events, air travel was still down, because of people’s fears. But the hijacking was a means to an end and is more reasonably looked upon as a conversion of avail- able delivery instruments into accurate fl ying bombs that killed thousands, altered this country, and succeeded in eliciting a spasmodic lashing out in Iraq that threatens to destabilize the Islamic world. Further, to ascribe what happened to Bin Laden is to fall into a convenient pattern of personal- izing events that cannot be personal and psychologizing them. In light of the organization, planning, money, command and control, and awareness of the United States required for the operation, Bin Laden could not have been delusional anymore than Hitler. Finally, what happened was not a clash between two civilizations (Huntington 1996), although President Bush used the word crusade after the attack. The horrors of 9/11 were covered by a global round-the-clock news presence. After playing catch-up for sev- eral weeks, the twenty-four-hour cable news system started to treat what it termed “the war, attack, etc., on America” much as it had treated the OJ trial and the Clinton scandals. The events of 9/11 cannot be understood out of context. Essentially, the context is global. September 11 marked a change in our history and necessarily in the human services. We must reclaim old habits of thinking morally to further social justice.

The years of the Clinton Administration have been labeled as self- indulgent and complacent. Such labels do not bear scrutiny. The Clinton era marked the consolidation of neoliberalism, American exceptionalism, our role as the world’s only superpower, the expansion of corporate infl uence, foreign policy as trade policy, and the recognition of Islamo-fascist terrorism. Many of the changes of the second Bush Administration were started in the Clinton Administration or before. For example, substantial changes in our military forces were started or furthered under Clinton. Asymmetrical warfare did not emerge as a concept only after 9/11; rather it increasingly was part of strategic thought during the Clinton years. The doctrine of preemptive war was also refi ned primarily by neoconservatives outside of the Clinton Administration. Also born during the Clinton Administra- tion, after a generation of somnolence referred to by the letter x, were the beginnings of a new concern with larger issues that lay outside the self. This new activism fl ourished in a rethinking of the global relation of poli- tics and economics and concretely took the form of many demonstrations

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28 Globalization, Social Justice and the Helping Professions

inspired by the one at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. This activism was highlighted on campuses by an increased awareness that social justice is a precious thing, routinely withheld from the wretched of the earth. Often, it took a highly specifi c form of work in sweatshops so that the well-off can well afford the products produced by the poor. Organization of this new generation in politics took advantage of the new technologies of the Internet, a twenty-four-hour news cycle, easy transportation, and even the possibility of producing media records of events to substitute for those produced by the traditional media (for example, see http://indymedia.org/). The anti-sweatshop movement and other movements having to do with globalization pepper this book. These provide a necessary context for the human services.

Thinking Big

People have been burned by thinking big and acting big only to see their social thought and action eventuate in futility or even in achieving the opposite of the outcomes intended. Most dramatic are the results of attempt- ing the realizations of some grand abstractions. With the fall of the wall in Berlin and the release of the Soviet republics and proximate countries, Marxism lost its status as a contract with history and became such an abstraction. The events in Seattle and similar events that followed made “neoliberal” free trade (perhaps even liberal capitalism), in its ideal ideal- ized form, questioned if not questionable, evidence of the possible failing of another grand abstraction. Thinking big is often the target of suspicion, something seemingly beyond practical can-do American know-how. The media, informal and formal education, specialized work, and homogenized isolated leisure discourage it. We have largely stopped thinking big, not accidentally but for reasons including ideology and personal circumstance. Sometimes, these social reasons are held to characterize the postmodern world; postmodern thought, indeed, another grand abstraction: postmod- ernism. Some fi ll the void of absent big thought by spiritual sentiment. Many are ignorant of the advances in big thought in the hard sciences. For example, success has been ample in thought about the physics of the very small and the very large—the human genome project and the big thought that underlies information technology. Thinking big has had enormous suc- cesses at times, and it is important now that we think big socially so that the human species can survive. Global warming will radically alter how we live. The growing difference between rich and poor will cause confl ict, as well as repression of confl ict. AIDS may well disrupt whole continents. We may start producing more “bads” than “goods.” Thinking about such

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29Contextualizing the Helping Professions

futures is fearful. Doing something about them may seem beyond our will or control. Long-term vision is part of big thought, and it may scare us. But thinking big socially ought to be a part of the human condition. Certainly, it is a constituent of social justice. One project of big thought ought to be a renewed interrogation into the frequent lack of it. Thinking big has turned from a luxury into a necessity. We do not speak about the frequent academic fashions of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary studies that, at best, break down artifi cial boundaries to thought. These academic enterprises are valid, but it risks surrendering thought to an intellectual casualness often incapable of thinking big, not because this approach ignores big issues but because it can so often avoid thought itself. We must be able to think big, wide, and deeply about social matters and social justice. It is within our collective powers as a species. A requisite of thinking big is the liberation of the rigid thought of individuals who too frequently think their thoughts encompass more than they do, whose thought precludes coopera- tion with the thoughts of others, whose thought is segmented, professional, and parochial, who think with the arrogance of power or ignorance.

Individual thought should facilitate big thought by the species. In signifi cant measure, this means an awareness of limitation, some knowl- edge of big thought, and the capacity to work with and learn from others. Indeed, something of this sort ought to be all that we expect of thinking big. Big thought must be capable of synthesis and analysis, of construc- tion and critique, of questioning and answering questions with yet more precise questions, of being informed by action, of placing professional skill sets in a global context, and of being capable of imagination and vision. Such thought is often diffi cult given ideological and personal circumstance. Individual big thought, if possible at all, is possible only to a few who are not suffi ciently numerous to ensure freedom, justice, and life for our species. Thinking big socially is not an impossible expectation to be dismissed and escaped from. It is a reasonable and necessary expectation. It is a sensible way to think while acting small.

Acting Small

On most occasions, we act small in our personal lives, in our families, and in our communities because action often occurs within small parameters. This behavior may issue from our genetic and social character. Such acting small requires the big thought of the species. For example, we may have to formally connect with a physician, teacher, or other human service profes- sional. We may have to rely on the wisdom of others, on knowledge from the Internet, on friends, neighbors, colleagues, and leaders. There is another

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30 Globalization, Social Justice and the Helping Professions

way in which we act small, and that is by way of a small action to infl uence a large project. We may have a bit part in a play. We may raise our small voice to the choir of human discourse. We may light one candle. In all such ways, we act small as part of a contribution to something big. It is only by thinking big that we can avoid the perils of inhumanity as a functionary in a bureaucracy, a cog in a machine, a drone in a beehive. Morality is in measure personal, and by giving up our concrete personhood we give up on the morality of thought and action alike. Of course, in our professional lives and associations we ought to “do no less.”

When we contribute a small part to some large enterprise, thinking big is often necessary or appropriate; however, we are apt not to think big, to not think the unthinkable. The thinkable issues of the blessedly forgotten Presidential campaign of 2000 largely concerned taxation, Social Security, prescription drugs, education, and several other issues. Not discussed in the campaign, by the media or in polite conversation, were such issues as the growing gap between rich and poor, the expanding power of corporations, terrorism, global warming, and many others at least as important as those discussed in the campaign. According to current ideology and circumstance, social exclusion is often an unthinkable thought, which is nonetheless con- cretely present. People who are excluded, disposed of, stigmatized, nullifi ed, need not be thought of at all. Although convenient, such social exclusion is hardly just, never mind how it discourages the big thought of the excluded. People who act small should think big enough to think big about unthinkable matters. People acting small as participants in big projects ought to think through the nature of the project and contemplate its consequences. Much makes this diffi cult. Projects often transcend the morality of the participants who act small. Indeed, some people comfort themselves with the thought that they are only doing a little harm, which would be done by someone else did they not do it. Thinking big is problematic, contested, and discour- aged. Thinking big and acting small is also problematic, often threatening ongoing projects and status-quo lives. Acting small and thinking big about the unthinkable is a challenge to the status quo. “Think big and act small,” then, is not the issue. Rather, the issue is simply thinking big.

When we act, most act small. This is altogether appropriate. However, it is not appropriate to refrain from acting, small or big. “Act small” takes on signifi cance as a moral injunction to act for social justice, as a moral state- ment that it is wrong not to act because of cynicism, despair, or neglect—or because the act seems too small. Action requires will, ability, power, and other qualities blocked or replaced by despair, cynicism, and even satisfac- tion. However, thinking big is always appropriate, and action of any size is appropriate not according to whether the action is big or small but according to whether it is smart or not, right or wrong, socially just. The scope of

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thought infl uences the possibility of action. We ought to think big; we ought to act as the possibilities for appropriate action become apparent. “Think big and act small” is not properly a statement of fact at all; it is a statement of value, indeed of social justice. Part of this statement easily overlooked is the conjunction and, which signifi es that the truth of the statement requires that its constituent elements are true together. If they are not true together, something may be amiss and unjust in the world of fact.

However, there is a spatial subtext to the statement that may refl ect more of the quest of some who use it: “Think globally and act locally.” However, local action is not a subset of small action, nor is global thought a subset of big thought, nor is “act locally and think globally” a form of “think small and act big.” For example, consider the Zapatista of the state of Chi- apas, Mexico. They wish only to continue their lives in largely nonmarket fashion. They correctly perceive that the commodifi cation and sale of their land will lead towards purchase of it by outside interests. They resist the commodifi cation of their bodies and labor, which they perceive as culminat- ing in the dependency and slavery that characterizes so many poor people, particularly in the countries of the global South. In short, the Zapatista wish only to be left alone, a big wish for a locality on an increasingly neoliberal globe. However, the Zapatista survive not because they have acted locally but because they have acted globally. The Zapatista made brilliant use of a new global invention, the Internet, originally developed to preserve US command and control capabilities after thermonuclear war. (The predecessor to the Internet was Arpanet, developed by The Department of Defense and paid for by taxpayers). Through the Internet, the Zapatista have been able to mobilize people not only in Mexico but also around the globe. Indeed, there is talk of the Zapatista Model. Their mastery of the Internet technol- ogy allows them to live and think big and act globally. (This remarkable use of technology brings to mind Martin Luther King’s mastery of another technology, television, in another movement directed at survival and lib- eration.) Although genocide in private might be acceptable to a Mexican government, public genocide is not. Messages from and about the Zapatista ricochet across the Web. The Zapatista act globally for a self-preservation that is local. Use of the Internet has enormously contributed to the success of the events in Seattle and beyond and made neoliberalism and its organi- zations (such as the WTO, NAFTA, IMF, and the World Bank), once little known, well known. The anti-sweatshop movement on college campuses was substantially coordinated over the Internet.

As another example, disabled people may fi nd it diffi cult to get togeth- er at one place at one time. On the beginning of the week before Halloween 2000, a Nike advertisement came to the attention of some people with disabilities and was widely distributed on the Internet. The ad grotesquely

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32 Globalization, Social Justice and the Helping Professions

played on the fears of prospective shoe buyers, warning that Nikes would prevent buyers from being forced to ride around in one of those motorized wheelchairs. Disabled people emailed their protests, and Nike pulled the ad. Of course, Nike also uses sweatshop labor in Third World countries, but in this case, there was no connection made between the anti-sweatshop movement and the disability rights movement.

As further example, the same university student cited in Chapter 1 critiques the disempowering learning that inculcates small thought, as he struggles for the empowerment of action and big thought.

Today, I am a dedicated educator, student, community organizer, and group facilitator. Over time, I have become critical of how many learning environments in our society, at times intention- ally but often unintentionally, too often lead to stressed and abused bodies, complacent minds, disempowered hearts, and individualistic, isolated spirits. I can recall my high school com- mencement; my classmates and I were proud students of passive learning, and a pedagogy that strangled curiosity and poisoned hope. I struggled to determine what knowledge was available in the typical modern educational environment. The typical student-teacher relationships I witnessed and experienced were often imbalanced power struggles. Some teachers I encountered acted as trumpeters of non-critical thinking, and non-creative acculturation. The fl ow of knowledge was assumed unidirectional. Questions only assured information absorption by the students. My response, upon reaching college, was to create alternative community-learning experiences for my community.

An examination of many modern educational models reveals the relative absence of pedagogical models that promote self-initiated engagement of participants and democratic self- organization. As a result education is too often disempowering and compartmentalized, leading to dependency, overly myopic problem-solving, non-participatory decision-making, and much more. What is needed are community based pedagogies for sus- tainable development that are based in various realms of whole systems thinking, place-based learning, participatory decision- making, process oriented communication, somatics, and creative expression. My desire to learn and to help provide alternatives for youth to learn within their communities leads me to strengthen and deepen my abilities, fi rst as a whole human being, then as a student, teacher, leader, artist, group facilitator, healer, community organizer, and nascent researcher in youth action for sustainable development and democracy.

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I stay close to this vision in my collaborative work with schools, non-profi ts, and grassroots organizations to research, develop, and implement a broad spectrum of experiential, par- ticipatory, and empowering community-based programs in food security, ecological literacy, creative expression, asset mapping, body awareness, and civic engagement. Through travels and research I have found that communities around the world are exploring these types of education. I believe these explorations affi rm that non-formal community-based education provides a foundation for both sustainable development and participatory democracy on a global scale.

When tradition, science, experience, wisdom, and resources are equally accessed by the diversity of all invested groups (youth, women, minorities, indigenous, business, government, unions, faith-based), the community will begin to discover opportunities to simultaneously learn from and serve personal/communal/ecological needs. My primary intent is to support communities around the world that wish to explore these possibilities and opportunities through education. With this in mind I wish to participate in and lead various action research projects of existing models of participatory community-based education for sustainable develop- ment, in both developing and developed nations. In addition I wish to facilitate the appropriate spaces for reciprocal proactive communication and refl ection among educators, community lead- ers, activists, academics, artists, healers, learners and teachers. My next project is to develop and support increasingly holistic and locally initiated programs that can support and guide the complex non-linear, paths toward a healthier, more integrated humanity and planet. To usher in the United Nation’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, advance toward the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, engage diverse populations with the Earth Charter, and to own our history young Americans are welcomed to explore together a new dream for a sustainable future.

Around the globe is the common acknowledgement that we live in a complex and critical era. The human species fi nds itself in a web of global interdependence where we can witness the consequences of destructive patterns in human activity. Children fi nd themselves born into a world, fi lled with both beauty and deprivation. And with this arrival of each genera- tion there is a renewal of our options to change. As we look around, there are leaders everywhere who seek to steer us onto a sustainable course. Separately we can accomplish very little.

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34 Globalization, Social Justice and the Helping Professions

We have many voices, we have many perspectives, and we are engaged. To be effective though, we cannot simply look at each other as adversaries. It is the younger generation that must take charge, and facilitate new partnerships across geography, faiths, generations, and sectors. Partnerships for mutual gains and civic entrepreneurship will come to characterize the 21st century. This does not mean order, conformity, or control, but rather individual and local engagement, supportive relationships, and creation of new learning communities. This is not idealism—this is a chal- lenge to rediscover our basic humanity. We are responsible to shape a livable future.

A Next Generation Team of diverse young leaders are gathering. Our work is now focused on offering United States youth between the ages of 14 and 30 with the opportunity to develop and produce the premier annual US event, the 2006 Youth Forum for a Sustainable Future. The Forum is a focus for ongoing education, entrepreneurship and action currently hap- pening in youth communities around the country. The Forum will be the culmination of the national Future Now Tour, and will be an integral part of engaging youth organizations in a National Youth Partnership for Sustainable Development and individual youth leaders in a National Sustainable Development Youth Council. The Forum will bring together ideas, information, and projects from around the world and will include both living and constructed elements representing all aspects of sustainability.

The event will serve to showcase all that a global sustainable future can be by encouraging new and greater forms of collabora- tion. The event will present leading products, businesses, profes- sional organizations, and even other events to an increasingly interested public to showcase the impressive work that exists in the fi eld of sustainable development. The fi rst Forum will be hosted on the edge of the beautiful Olympic National Park in Washington State—home to the largest remaining tract of old growth forest in the US. All people will be welcome to gather and engage young peoples’ diverse yet interdependent visions for a healthy, equitable, and sustainable future. A primary objec- tive of the Forum will be to identify, train, and connect young leaders from the nation’s many youth communities, businesses, networks, and councils.

Creating the Forum requires the development and coordina- tion of multiple youth-led ventures including sustainable business enterprises, communal and ecological learning, artistic creation,

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35Contextualizing the Helping Professions

and intergenerational mentoring relationships. Together these ventures co-create mutual and sustainable gain at the nexus of fi nancial-built, social, cultural, and ecological capitals. All revenue generated by the promotion of strategic youth ventures will be directly reinvested into youth-led activities for the empowerment, health, and equity of other youth and of future generations. The long-term vision is to focus youth talent, compassion, and ingenu- ity in the creation of a sustainable existence—an existence that ensures a beautiful and nurturing world to children born seven generations from today.

Ethics, Thought, and Action

In other areas, different connections have been made. The rapidly growing Internet appears in rapidly growing global politics, at times the inverse of the slogan: people should think locally and act globally about social justice. People should think big. And they should act, regardless of the size of the action. Indeed, most actions are small. Hence, the appeal of think big and act small. But this disguises the profound truth that people should always think big—and deeply and widely—particularly about questions beyond the realm of propriety, about the unthinkable. Further, people should act, despite what they may have absorbed about the futility of action. All these are not things that people necessarily do. But they should do them. We are used to judging morality in relation to action. As the use of the word should in this paragraph indicates, there is not only a morality to action but to social thought. This is the social justice in thought. The moral aspect of social thought, the moral injunction to think, and moral thinking itself are usually left by the wayside by social structure, ideology, circumstance, education, scholarship, and research. If the proximity of the words thought and morality seems strange, it is perhaps a signal of limits to confi ned thought and of the necessity of applying big thought to social justice.

A model of Anglo-Saxon rationality, Sherlock Holmes, did not know whether the earth was fl at or the surface of a globe, indeed he had no inter- est in this question. With astonishment, Dr. Watson pressed Holmes on the question. With equanimity, Holmes answered that this particular piece of knowledge had no bearing on his peculiar (and arguably helping) profes- sion. Why then should any member or student of the human services know about big issues described in this book? Although we are concentrating on globalization, similar arguments could be made about the other big issues including, of course, social justice. A few partial answers appear elsewhere in this book.

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36 Globalization, Social Justice and the Helping Professions

The Human Services

Members of the human services may well receive an education that fur- nishes the student with the language of the profession, immerses him in the culture of the profession, gives the student a menu of practice applications, and places her in an internship. This is true in all professions. Remarkable is the radical bifurcation between college and professional education. In college, there is at least formal emphasis on breadth of knowledge, learn- ing how to think and to ask questions, even once a major starts. We accept liberal education as appropriate for undergraduates. To an extent, it is appropriate for graduate students, who are educated to be able to teach in universities. Add to this the apprenticeship of being a teaching assistant or a research assistant, writing a dissertation, and learning that being a professional involves continual learning after the degree. However, neither the education of undergraduates, nor of graduate students, currently characterizes the education of many professionals. For example, the class- room experience in medical school involves absorbing immense amounts of information from texts, which teachers rarely question. This is often justifi ed by the enormous amount of information needed in the profession of medicine. According to some, it is the nature of medical education, particularly the classroom segment, that elicits a certain authoritarianism and medicalization of life by physicians. For the patient, this is not an optimal outcome. Indeed, such seems to be the case with the classroom portion of most professional education. Without questioning professional education, it is impossible to make any serious claims concerning education and globalization. In social work, courses in ethics and social policy are sometimes less serious examinations of their subject matter than they are an acculturation to the profession. Despite the immense amount that must properly be learned in professional school in order to provide appropriate skill sets, some signifi cant portion of professional education should be in the tradition of the liberal arts. That case is more easily made today when the world changes so quickly, indeed too quickly for knowledge gained in school to have much lasting value. Thus, globalization, terrorism, politics, economics—and, of course, social justice—ought to be part of a professional curriculum in the human services.

Globalization affects the environment in which the professional works and the environment in which the professional’s clients exist. As examples, globalization fi gures largely in the privatization of once public programs, the growing infl uence of insurance companies and managed care, the changing nature of work that affects the professional and client, the realignments of family and community, the increased distance between rich and poor, and often shrinking resources. Such examples and others are suffi cient to

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37Contextualizing the Helping Professions

demand an acquaintance with globalization. Whether we survive as a species or whether bacteria inherit the earth depends substantially on events that transcend national borders—such as pollution, unsustainable development, the greenhouse effect, and other dangers to our global environment. which eventually may not be reversible. Further, terrorism, war, poverty, disease, migration, and more must be thought about globally and in terms of how they affect the survival of the species. Such matters should not be left to fate, policymakers, or experts. Responsibility cannot be passed off; rather, all should share it.

To be a human service professional is to be an active citizen, requir- ing thought and action about global issues. Further, to be a human service professional requires a recognition, teaching, and learning about big issues like social justice. Increasingly, the clients of the human services show the effects of globalization. They speak in different languages. They are members of diverse cultures. Further, they suffer anomie, distance from their children or parents, insecurity or anger at their jobs, substance abuse, dysthymia, or depression. Globalization involves dangers and opportunities for current and future human service professionals. Enhancing or realizing the promise is as important as avoiding or mitigating the danger. The dissolving of national borders is a promise of a globe more unifi ed. Global equity and sustainable development are no longer mere dreams but necessities. The dispersion of technologies has already made good on many promises, including global television, telecommunications, and rapid inexpensive transportation of people, goods, and services. Increased wealth, health, life expectancy, and even happiness are possible. The Internet can bring people together, pool and channel knowledge, and enhance commerce.

The opportunities and promises of globalization ought to be realized by current and future professionals along with the dangers. For example, a professional teacher is well advised to recognize that little support for educa- tion in a community may be forthcoming because jobs are moving. Lawyers (and courts) will be ever more compelled to deal with international law. Nurses must communicate with patients who do not understand or speak English. Social workers will have to reckon with the dislocating facts of globalization, immigration, and lack of social cohesion, all manifested in the suburbs of any large city. Of course, more examples could be added, and the number of human services increased. The education of human service professionals ought to be such as to further promise and avert danger. It is a claim of almost every generation, and probably true with most, that we are at a turning point. Today most such claims involve globalization. Knowledge of globalization is needed not only to recognize possibility but to recognize limitations on local action. Human service professionals should realize the implications of globalization, big thought, and social justice.

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38 Globalization, Social Justice and the Helping Professions

Most generations have thought of themselves as critical when they occupied the globe. This does not diminish the reckoning that we live in a particularly critical time. The technological progress that is one of the triumphs of the human species has started to show its dangerous underbelly. We run a panoply of human creativeness—from pollution to the greenhouse effect, to exhausting our natural resources, to improvements in the technol- ogy of war that allow us to destroy our species. Indeed, it is not going too far to suggest that global social justice is not only desirable but necessary.

References

Fanon, F. 1968. Wretched of the earth. Pref. by J.-P. Sartre. Trans. by C. Farrington, New York: Grove Press.

Huntington, S. P. 1996. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Johnson, C. A. 2004. Blowback: The costs and consequences of american empire. New York: Metropolitan/Owl Book.

http://indymedia.org. n.d.

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CHAPTER 3

Collaborative, Democratic Professionalism Aimed at Mobilizing Citizens to Address Globalization’s

Challenges and Opportunities

Hal A. Lawson

A funny thing happened on the way to the twenty-fi rst century. A new concept developed: globalization. Today this new concept is immensely popu- lar, and indeed, some analysts refer to this new century as “the global era.” Globalization’s popularity stems in part from countless books and journal articles, which have been written during the last ten years. The print, voice, video, and computer media promote it. New college and university cours- es—indeed, entire programs of study now focus on it. Protest movements have developed to thwart it. These and other popularizing mechanisms help account for the skyrocketing popularity of “globalization discourse”—a sys- tem of language. This globalization discourse also feeds on itself, thereby accelerating its development.

Clearly, something important is going on, and everyone needs to take notice.

The question is: take notice of what? In other words, what does glo- balization mean and entail? More specifi cally, why is it important? Where would you look for it? What would you look for? How would you know it if you saw it? How would you talk about it? And, what should you know and be able to do in relation to it? Arguably, educated citizens from diverse

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