It’s how they validate their jobs, their paychecks and perpetuates the government oversight of private lives that keeps them employed.
That’s accurate in a broader sense, but bear in mind, these women were not working for any government necessarily. The one was a freelance contract social worker, in this instance having a local State court as her client, and I have no idea how the other one was getting paid.
The advocate lady herself brought out a credit card to pay for their lunch (not my soup and coffee), which had the appearance that she was spending her own money, but I have learned a lot since then about the world of social workers and the supposedly “non-profit” economy they work in, suggesting that the credit card had been issued by or borrowed from the local mental health agency she worked for, an NPO and probably one which she also worked for on contract and not as an employee.
It is tricky to try and determine the motives of this sort of people. It may be overly simplistic to say they worked for the government and had a vested interest in keeping me in the system. Neither was actually true at that table. They worked for themselves, and had in the short term a vested interest in stuffing their faces and washing it down with a lovely glass of wine. Neither of them really gave a rat’s ass whether I stayed in the system or took a long walk off a short pier.
On a wider scale, I was trying to navigate in a murky arena where law, mental health and child welfare all intersect. Each one has its own economy and sources of revenue. The lawyers get paid by their own clients or by NPOs that provide legal aid funding from whatever source. The mental health people get their paycheck from various levels of official funding, but don’t necessarily have any vestiture case by case in seeing to it that one person be caught in the vortex of officialdom; they’ll get paid regardless. And as for people whose brief in the matter involved child welfare, they had both private and public inflow to pay their bills and fund their lifestyles. I ended up paying several of these parasites out of my own pocket to the tune of a going rate of $150 an hour, to do “supervised visitation” which was an even worse sort of ambush of note-taking to gather evidence against me only with a toddler along.
The only actual government employees I ever dealt with in the whole affair, were a couple of judges who had to be kept awake while proceedings entirely scripted and stage-managed by private lawyers and contract social workers got played out in their courtrooms.
What really explained everyone’s conduct more than vested interests, was “foregone conclusions.” Everyone involved knew starting out that I would never be granted custody of my child, and that the mother would never be prosecuted or incarcerated for having abducted him without my parental consent. What had begun by one parent committing a felony, only had to be converted into a whole other type of case by putting the other parent on trial for being the one who got abandoned.
That was easy. It was neither vested interest nor ideology which were used in working that bit of sleight-of-hand, but rather a set of procedural templates.
The math of me in the affair was “male + blue collar + wife ran away and took the kid = abusive father.” That was the foregone conclusion.
The templates of procedures just had to be worked and entered properly into the record, to show that since everybody already knew this was a case of child abuse, everybody had done their correct exercises of due diligence to make the record show that. None of it really had anything to do with me, or my son, or his mother. All three of us were just props to set the templates in motion, and everybody got paid. Nobody cared if any of us got stuck in the system or not. Only that the money flowed to where they could ultimately use it, which was into their own pockets in service of their chosen middle-class lifestyles.
So I was guilty before I ever even walked in the restaurant that day. My not being prepared to match the ladies’ appetites in fine dining and wine, meant that I was a deadbeat who didn’t have any money. My not being dressed as anything but what I was, which was a carpenter missing a day’s work, meant that I was incapable of behaving appropriately. I mean, come on, blue jeans and boots in a four-star restaurant? That just has “child abuser” written all over it, anybody knows that. My discomfiture at being asked personal questions that were none of these people’s business, meant I was guilty and had something to hide. Etc, etc, etc.
What I learned from the entire experience, was about how careerism works in that crossover space of law, mental health and child welfare. None of the people had anything to lose if the law got broken or the mentally unwell stayed sick (like the basket-case grandmother, a walking lunatic if I ever met one, who had gone on and got a license to practice social work and used it to break her grandson’s family apart for sport), nor even if the child got abused, such as spending his entire life being told his father was dangerous and had abandoned him because that reading of a case fit the procedural templates.
It is the very numbness of these people I find terrifying, not their intentions in anyone else’s lives. Their numbness is what allows them to sit and cram blackened salmon down their throats while blandly determining a little boy’s future for him. It allows them to get on jet airliners and go take vacations in Hawaii or Mexico paid for by chumps like me whom they charge ten times his own hourly income to spy on him and build a case against him.
And government had hardly anything to do with any of this comic-opera. Government’s only role was to provide the venue for going through the motions so a judge could gavel them. The rest was done in the private or non-profit sectors, and everybody was making tidy profits while never getting their hands dirty and knowing they’d never be called to account years later for a young man growing up with half a family and having the truth about his own life kept from him.
He’s 19 now, and still too afraid to get in touch with me or his grandparents or his uncle or cousins or his own sister. Where are all those people so “concerned” about his well-being, now?
