Ø Invention,
Ø Creating new cultural elements,
Ø Diffusion, the spread of cultural
traits from one society to another
These three models are proposed as methods of changing
a culture. And there is a mountain of evidence, not to mention public resistance,
historic allegiances including the pursuit of something commonly called
stability, (another word for security?) and that old reliable, increased cost,
that paints a picture of Canada as highly resistance, in the macro sense, to
cultural change.
To be sure, we have opened our national ‘doors’ to
immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, (whether there has been adequate and
sustaining assimilation and integration of those new arrivals is another
question entirely). And we have, as have most developed nations, transformed
much of our economy to accommodate the digital revolution. Our health care
system, something we call national, with full (?) and equal (?) access,
affordable and still in need of more evolution, is a monumental societal
change, one of the more bountiful legacies of the last half of the twentieth
century.
Similarly, flowing from the last half of the twentieth century are
“employment” insurance, injured worker compensation, pensions and old age
security. More recently, child care benefits and parental leave upon the birth
or adoption of a new child have been added to the social safety net. The
Charter of Rights, (1981) has given legal foundation to the human rights of all
citizens, and several cases testing its provisions have secured Supreme Court
affirmation. Another recent cultural change whose implications will cataract
through the next several decades in the legalization of marijuana, not merely
for medicinal purposes, but for recreational use.
On the other side of the ledger, however, the
integration of minority language rights
(French specifically) into provinces with substantial French-speaking
populations, for example, Ontario have suffered a serious set-back as recently
as this week, when the premier of Ontario terminated the French Language
Commissioner’s Office, and withdrew support for a French language university in
the provincial capital, without incurring much by way of push-back from the
province’s editorial writers. Similarly, the Ontario government has also
eliminated the office of the Commissioner responsible for oversight of
Environmental Protection. Framed as “budget cut-backs” these regressive
governmental steps, nevertheless, demonstrate that social and cultural change
seems highly dependent on the mood, ideology, personnel and commitments of the
government of the day. Adding to this equation of the tendencies of specific
governments are the temperature, the ‘humidity’ and the velocity of what are
perceived as the cultural/political/societal/attitudinal/geopolitical/economic
winds that blow from continent to continent, across oceans and mountains.
Following the second world war, optimism in North
America was running quite high, portending to support for and even political
impetus for such massive projects in the U.S. as the Inter-state highway system
for which President Eisenhower’s name is most closely associated. The St.
Lawrence Seaway was also shovelled, and re-routed, along with the moving of
entire communities when mega-projects and the political thinking and will needed
were at a peak.
These big projects were on the engineering stage, and
needing only the money, the expertise and skill, and the public political
support for their construction. They opened up transportation, travel, trade
and new relationships between and among American states, and between Canada and
the U.S.
On the level of the governmental bureaucracies, in
both Canada and the United States, however, thousands of new jobs, perhaps even
millions, have been created in large public bureaucracies to provide the social
safety nets that have been designed and delivered to provide a “hand-up” to
those in need. Pension boards, childrens’ protective services, community
policing (another highly influential and positive shift in the way police
relate to their respective communities), greater integration of social services
with schools, along with increased exposure to the labour market for secondary
and post-secondary students have made a significant difference in the
opportunities available in contemporary education.
However, just as became tragically and desperately
evident immediately following the 9/11 massacre in Manhattan, siloed
bureaucracies are inordinately isolated, separated, alienated and too often in
competition with other bureaucratic silo’s. There has been a long and deep
history, on both sides of the 49th parallel, of “protecting our turf”
so that we keep those jobs, and those secure boundaries around our
specialties, around our people, and most certainly around our executive
leadership. Schools have retained off-duty police officers to monitor school
dances for years. Occasionally, a social worker will interact with a guidance
department, to discuss and implement a ‘treatment plan’ for a student in or
from a troubled and troubling family. Workplaces entertain students for “employment-peeking”
opportunities; colleges and universities regularly host “orientation”
(recruiting) days on high school campuses. On a case-by-case basis, there is a
trace of a pathway cleared from the underbrush of political and bureaucratic
tradition.
As in many other spheres, towns and regions, partly
resulting from the tidal wave of technology that opens books, offices,
research, and ‘best practices’ around the world, for whoever might be
interested. We all have access to what Vancouver, and more recently Toronto,
might be doing to combat their serious and tragic opioid/fentanyl crisis.
Police departments have immediate access to both technology and successful
experiments in their use in visionary departments in other jurisdictions.
Similarly, the medical profession’s integration of DNA’s hub value in the
treatment of diseases like cancer, through new medical school research, medical
journals, and pharmaceutical advances on the cutting edge of unique, personal
and demonstrably effective “cocktail” of medicine.
So, there is considerable evidence that supports the
breaking down of political “walls” that keep many best candles/practices securely
“vaulted” under organizational/corporate, municipal, provincial, and national “bushels”.
Nevertheless, when the homeless hub designed and
released, by webinar, to the public a road map for the prevention of
homelessness, including a heavy emphasis on prevention, some of the
participants’s eyes and ears recoiled in memory of how our Canadian culture has
adapted/adopted prevention as a cultural paradigm when faced with similar and
very troubling social issues. Teen-pregnancy, for example, as an issue begging
for prevention, and has been recipient of religious “abstinence” programs, “promise-keeper”
covenants, political campaigns that protest the distribution of birth control,
and the chestnut, the campaign to eliminate therapeutic abortions. On the other
hand, even practicing Roman Catholics have spurned the dictates of their
hierarchy, and welcomed contraception with open arms.
An old adage seems relevant: children are falling in
at a water-fall, with large numbers of “people” pulling them out at the bottom
of the cataract, while a few go to the top of the falls to determine why they
are becoming victims to nature’s force. There is an immediate gratification for
those rescuing drowning children at the base of the falls. There is a ‘rush’
that accompanies that gratification. The process of the rescue is quite simple,
easily accomplished, and eminently bonding between rescuer and rescued, often
for life. Each rescue receives public and merited attention and commendation,
whether through the stories within the community, or perhaps even from the
wider coverage of the large media. Politicians, especially, like to find photo-ops
with “local heroes” wherever they can.
Almost ignored, in most social traumas, are those at
the top of the falls, struggling without many resources, without the limelight
of social/political/cultural affirmation, to remove those conditions that are
generating the crisis before it develops. Compared with the “rescuers” at the
bottom of the falls, these “prevention activists” work behind the scene of the
tragedy, without the promise or expectation of public adulation and awards,
without the resources that a public considers needed, and without the immediate
gratification, or even the assurance, that they will overcome the force(s) that
suck those children into the vortex of the cataract. University science labs
are filled with researchers “at the top of the falls”; social policy designers
depend on the findings of those researchers. However, there is a significant ‘time-gap’
between the discoveries of the researchers, and the design and promulgation of
social policy, and another between the policy and the implementation.
Shifting the public consciousness from the rewards of
rescuing to the drudgery of prevention is analogous to the task of shifting the
direction of an ocean liner from north to south. It takes a lot of patience,
diligent hard work, a committed team/crew and some decision-makers who have the
open-mindedness to even consider the benefits of the shift, the conditions
necessary to turn the wheel, and the patience to wait for the long-term results
that will show up in reports that the number of kids falling into the waterfall
has dropped significantly. Only then will it be feasible for many of the
adjacent observers to “see the light” of the larger social benefits, and the
relative folly of those years/decades/centuries of pulling kids out, without preventing
their falling in. It is often the “time gap” in the perception of relative “urgency”
between public figures (the politicians/tax payers) and the researchers/policy
designers that impedes the reception and implementation of a significant shift
like the one from “action/rescue” to “prevention/delayed gratification. Individuals
are most often disposed and enmeshed with the opportunities for instant
gratification; social policy think tanks, on the other hand, find their
gratification in their design and teaching of new approaches, based as it
usually is, on the compilation, collation and curation of multiple pieces of
research from various scholars/practitioners.
While classical conditioning (the timing and relevance
of behavioural rewards to generate desired behaviour) is not the only variable
to shifting a culture from “rescue to prevent,” it does have application to the
process.
“Invention” is one ingredient that we can all count on
to emerge from the social and scientific “laboratory” research, and “prevention”
of homelessness clearly qualifies as a highly inventive (if not actually
revolutionary) approach to this growing social blight.
“New cultural elements” like:
·
pointing a social, political, media,
educational, religious ‘cleg’ light onto the “top of the falls”,
·
innovative funding based on the hiring and
releasing of outside-the-box ingenuous bureaucrats by politicians and social
agency decision-makers, including volunteer board members,
·
training for all constituent agencies in
the benefits of the new “approach” that includes a difference between the “ticker”
approach of the stock market with its urgent immediacy, to a longer social and
cultural perspective of the benefits of long-range planning and implementation of
such a “shift”
·
building bridges to all sectors to enhance
awareness of and participation in the frontal initiative to address the roots
of homelessness from a preventive perspective, as a pathway both to fewer victims
and reduced social costs. This includes debunking the “complexity” and up-front
“costs” of such a far-reaching and “macro” approach, in order to reach individuals
before they “fall”
·
providing leadership in continuing research,
public conscious-raising, private fund-raising, political pressure and social
change
Linked to this “new cultural elements” is the digging
out and “transporting” best practices from all successful practitioners in the field,
from other communities in the region, from other national neighbours, and from
countries facing similar homelessness across the globe. These little screens
have wireless access to the little screens in all of the laboratories, lecture
halls, media newsrooms, governmental offices and legislatures, courts, and
international agencies charged with economic and social and political “wellness”
of our varied and complex cultures. And from those little screens, with diligence,
discipline, collaboration and a renewed sense of altruism among all
participants, in that “we are all in this together,” each community can acquire
relevant information, social and political models and a new sense of hope and optimism
that our most treasured jewels, our youth, need not fall through the cracks of
indifference, apathy, anger, frustration, the abuse of power, and/or the
incidents of poverty, disease, displacements. These cracks develop inside
loving families, inside caring schools, within the sanctuaries of religious organizations,
inside athletic teams, the military, and within all social/political organizations
and corporations.
We can all become more sensitive about those
conditions on the top of the “falls” within our purview, and the potential for
young people to “fall” and to open our eyes, ears, minds and hearts to the notion
that we might each have to shift our own “comfort zone” from detachment,
refusing to intervene in another’s plight, keeping our time and treasure secure
and safe, and believing that we are not “good” enough to become a part of the
cultural shift that could lead to fewer “falling” into the whirlpool of
homelessness, including the impacts of the well-intentioned social agencies currently
operating on the front lines.
