Why Social Work?

“Good Afternoon, I want to congratulate you on the work you have been doing. Today is no easy task and we ask more of you still. Before we break up into your sessions I want you to take a moment and forget where you are and instead think about your compassion, the love that you feel and your ability to care. Think about your strength of heart. This is something I think about when everything around me starts to become difficult to manage. It reminds me of what I have learned here and of those who will always stand by me. Because it can be easy to start to believe that you might be lost as a pawn in this world. It can be easy to be afraid that you will leave here empty handed after two long years. I want to stop you right there. One of the most motivating things I have read is: “Society would continue to survive with the absence of many professions. If you took away doctors and nurses, people would grow sick and possibly die, but society would still go on. And if my professors will forgive me, if you removed teachers, society would still continue to learn, albeit at a slower pace. But the moment you take away people who are willing to stand up for the rights of others and to go out each day and do good, society is doomed to fail.” As social workers, you play out this part of modern day knights, standing up for the rights and needs of society. We live in a world where wars are made and the wealthiest call the shots and somehow that is our wisdom, but I know that there is so much more, not by the rules and strictures, but just by looking within myself and at all of you.

I wish there was an easier way. Today we have heard from those who have taken the more difficult path, those who have gone against the flow and against the accepted norm to make their choice. Each one of us has a choice, a choice as Dennis Waitley puts: To accept the things the way they are, or to accept the responsibility for changing them. Today is a challenge to yourself to not blindly accept what is in front of you. To ask yourself, what things move you? Your motivation can be the joy you feel at an accomplished task or the anger your feel at some injustice. Anything worth those feelings is worth the fight and does it help you to know I feel them too? I have felt shame. I have felt shame not for the wrong things I have done but for the right things that I did not do. And it has pushed me into seeing how much more we have to offer. During the past two years I have seen the great things that can be accomplished with you by my side, and I would gladly face the world with you.

One of the things that have stayed with me this year is the idea of visioning. Imagining the perfect outcome to help you strive for a better future. We also need to do this as individuals. We spend so much time thinking about what world could be like without also trying to imagine our perfect self, to be the person and the social worker we envision ourselves. I hear and I see your struggles because they’re mine as well. But I ask you to consider the possibility of what would happen if we decided that despite our fears, despite the ease that it is to say “it could never be,” If for once we saw all that something could be and still did not disengage, did not run from our fear, if we did not yield. Fear of losing what we have should never dictate what we stand for and the things we go for.

Standing for dignity, social justice and human worth is what we vow to do in our profession. Our integrity to do so is perhaps our greatest asset. That perfect world we think we lost is hidden in shadows. Be the light. Bring the light of awareness with you, cognitive dissonance only works until awareness steps in, after that it is impossible to go back to the way it was and we will wonder how we’ve wandered so long in the past. Yes, we can’t always succeed, but we also can’t always fail. To give up before we even start is accepting failure as our only option. It is turning a blind eye and ignoring what is in front of us. We can no longer afford to be a generation of apathetics who are more concerned with the status of our facebooks while ignoring the status of our lives and those lives around us.

We as a society have been silent. We have been silent because we are too tired, too overwhelmed; working multiple jobs to keep the status quo, fighting against unemployment. We are kept silent, kept exhausted because the tired do not question, and the overwhelmed do not demand better. I know you’re tired. I’m tired. I know you’re overwhelmed, and over worked. I’m still asking you to care, I’m still asking you to be their voice and to find your voice. Look around you, we are all working towards a common goal, but having an MSW behind your name doesn’t automatically make your task complete. Do not be fooled into believing you must always have the answers. We do not need to start with the solution; we need to be the movement.

It is our job to stand up for those who cannot do it themselves. To stand for what you believe in and even when the whole world is telling you to move it is our job to say “no.” And in these times when it seems that the whole world is against you, I want you to remember this; I want you to remember these people beside you for we must all stand together. I want more, and I want more for you, and more importantly than anything else I want you to not only want more, but to want better.

Years from now, will we sit there and say we accepted degrading circumstances because that is the way it was? Or can we say that we accepted our duty to try to change them? One day we all will have to answer: “Where were you when they tried to change the world?” Elsewhere will not be an answer. Change can happen, and can happen everywhere so long as good people are willing to stand up and fight for it

Now we can sit idly by asking “why does nothing ever turn out like it should,” or we can stand up. We can stand up and say I will be better, do better, and try harder than before. So I ask each one of you this now. Who here will stand with me? Who here will stand up because you decide that you will make a change. I want you to get out of your chairs this very moment if this is something you can believe in. Get up if right here and now if this is a life you can believe in and work towards. Get up if you can say that I want to live a life that I can be proud of, that elsewhere will not be my answer. The time has come to see the world as it should be and to move towards making it that way”

Now look around you again, you now all have a common thread. We might be a group of individuals; and each individual is like a raindrop. Alone we might fall and leave a minimal mark. Put together they have the force and strength of a raging typhoon. No matter where you end up or what you do, you forever will have each other standing beside you, backing you up. Today we learn that social movements were not left in the 60’s, it is not just OWS, it is today, it is here, it is now. Today we stand here a social movement; your words into action turn into change. It is now up to you to go forth and determine the cause.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VoJ9fiuNSM&feature=youtube_gdata_playerAdvocacy Day Speech