{"id":390,"date":"2005-09-04T01:45:48","date_gmt":"2005-09-04T06:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/09\/04\/the-careless-society\/"},"modified":"2005-09-04T13:32:46","modified_gmt":"2005-09-04T18:32:46","slug":"the-careless-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/09\/04\/the-careless-society\/","title":{"rendered":"The Careless Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

The events in New Orleans — weather, community, government and media — have me re-reading John McKnight’s Careless Society: Community and It’s Counterfeits<\/em>…<\/p>\n

Service systems can never be reformed so that they will “produce” [or even “deliver”] care. Care is the consenting commitment of citizens to one another. Care cannot be produced, provided, managed, organized, administered, or commodified. Care is the only thing a system cannot produce. Every institutional effort to replace the real thing is a counterfeit.<\/p>\n

Care is, indeed, the manifestation of a community. The community is the site for the relationships of citizens. And it is at this site the the primary work of a caring society must occur. If that site is invaded, co-opted, overwhelmed, an dominated by service-producing institutions, then the work of the ocmmunity will fail. And that failure is manifest in families collapsing, schools failing, violence spreading, medical systems spinning out of control, justice systems becoming overwhelmed, prisons burgeoning, and human services degenerating.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

New Orleans under water sounds like a fast-forward version of this loss of care. And the scary thing about it, the nagging sensation that permeates our watching, is that we know that our own communities of care have also been decimated by institutionalization, professionalization, monetization into “services” of what used to be simple, powerful community practice. <\/p>\n

We used to know things, in the places where we live. Now we might not even know many of the people. In this way, many many of us are living below sea level. McKnight’s response? Asset-Based Community Development<\/a>.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: via The Independent<\/a> <\/p>\n

… Although a government exercise last year predicted the course of the disaster, Mr Bush drastically cut back spending on city defences. Work on strengthening vital levees needed to keep out flood water stopped for the first time in 37 years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What else, if not “careless?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The events in New Orleans — weather, community, government and media — have me re-reading John McKnight’s Careless Society: Community and It’s Counterfeits… Service systems can never be reformed so that they will “produce” [or even “deliver”] care. Care is the consenting commitment of citizens to one another. Care cannot be produced, provided, managed, organized, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Careless Society”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88889,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-care","category-miscellany","tag-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}