Social Workers (and Teachers and Nurses, etc.) Are Exhausted
Why we need civics, trust, and possibly miracles
My son is applying to the U.S. Service Academies this year — the Naval Academy, West Point, the Air Force Academy. It’s his senior year of high school. During my pregnancy with him, I was one of those rare moms who did not want to know the gender of my baby before birth. When he was born, and the doctor announced, “You have a baby boy!” My first thought was, “Wow, that is the loudest cry I’ve ever heard.” My second thought was, “I hope he doesn’t want to go into the military.”
In fourth grade, he bounded into the family room and handed me the laptop computer with the homepage of the Air Force Academy on the screen. “Look at this, Mom!” he exclaimed. “Doesn’t this look awesome?”
The first word I saw on the website: “Indoctrination.”
“Indoctrination!” I yelled. “I don’t want you to be indoctrinated!”
He snatched the computer away, glaring at me. “You don’t understand,” he sulked. I’d betrayed his sense of possibility and hope.
I thought for a few minutes. “I’m trying to indoctrinate you, too. I guess that’s what parents do. There will always be some kind of force to try to shape your thinking and your actions. I really just hope you think for yourself, even if it’s different than me.”
And now, he’s 18 and he has both a gut instinct that military service is the right place for him and also a more mature, thought-out reasoning in support of it; my son wants an immediate application to what he learns in school and he wants to be of service. Which, funnily enough, are the exact reasons I returned to school at 27 years old to get my masters in social work. It turns out — despite outward appearance— that many of the same things drive us.
******
Maybe there’s something particularly American, old-fashioned, and optimistic about the drive toward an occupation that is “of service.” You have to have some belief that “helping” or “serving” makes a difference in individual lives and I am guessing that many of us believe it makes a difference in society as a whole.
