2-3-4 Friday
‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’
1 THOUGHT
Yesterday I heard Law Minister K Shanmugam speak about the death penalty and drugs in Singapore. It was a surprisingly refreshing take on an issue that’s caused quite a lot of controversy for Singapore abroad.
For those who’re not well acquainted, Singapore does maintain the death
penalty for drug trafficking.
But I want to pull out what Minister Shanmugam pointed out in the Q&A segment. Firstly, the need for a soft heart, but a hard head.
Often when we do work that leans towards social causes, we may lean overly towards grace, without considering justice. I like to see it this way.
Grace helps us love, but justice helps us to keep loving.
It’s love with boundaries. So when
someone repeatedly disappoints you, you learn to put in place consequences for that action.
One question that was repeatedly raised during his initial remarks was (and here I paraphrase because there were no recordings that could be made during the session),
When we talk about whether the death penalty is fair, who talks about whether the consequences for the general public are fair, such as whether they can walk about the streets safe at night; or whether
the consequences for babies born with drug dependencies, are fair?
And here Shanmugam drew the distinction between an ideological difference, and a pragmatic difference. Ideologically we may choose to disagree whether the taking of a life is fair.
But pragmatically, the evidence is clear that the death penalty serves an effective deterrent, with numbers such as a 66% in reduction in net weight of opium trafficking over 4 years.
When we
apply this to our practice and work, I think we then begin to ask ourselves if there are things that we are not willing to do because of ideological, or pragmatic reasons.
For example, some examples would include:
- Do we choose to take a smaller pay at a charity, over working in a government body, because we disagree with how government works?
- Do we choose the political party that has policies that work, or the political party that aligns with our
ideals?
1 TALK
Do we choose what works, or what’s ideal?
1 TIP
As a social worker who started with grand ideals about the change I could make, one of the biggest changes is in terms of simply asking,
Does social work work?
And if it doesn’t, why not?
One of the big things I found was that unwittingly, I could be endemically entrenching a family within the system of care, because I would give them
just enough to survive on, but not enough to thrive on, and properly break through the cycle of poverty.
Perhaps today the wider question is not whether you should quit social work, but to ask yourself
- If things worked well for my clients or for myself, what would that look like?
- Why is that (not) happening?
John
Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love
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