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"The food stamp program, part of
the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing
the greatest amount of food stamps ever. Meanwhile, the
Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks
us to "please do not feed the animals" because the animals may
grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves”.
- Unknown
This is really a tricky one, at
face, it makes sense, but it's
Blank Slate.
It's a BS driven paradigm and I thought
making it a TPOV, may mean an opportunity for readers of these
TPOVs to fully grasp another difference between
FLOW and
BS,
as well as between humans and animals.
While my first thought about it was
to agree on the irony, my second thought is this is typical
scaffolding for BS.
On one hand, it makes sense to help
people when they are in need, but to get into
FLOW, we need to
identify quickly what that need is and begin to help them get
the scaffolding, if necessary to solve the upline issue,
rather than just saying if you qualify, you get x, y or z, we
will treat your symptoms.
I don't want to seem foolish and
prescribe a cure worse than the disease, so it's critical that
we create and apply a toolkit, because in the past, or perhaps
even now, it may cost more to treat the "affliction" than the
disease. So in fact, by handing out the stamps, it might be a
least cost solution --> to rely on the social stigma that may
have been greater in the past, to get people to work on
solving their dilemmas quickly and move off support.
Yet, this system probably can't be
EES [Efficient, Effective,
Sustainable].
But let's take a look at the
"helping" system, and without personal experience with food
stamps, someone reading who might know about the system, can
add some context here. I'm going to assume for example
sake, that you fill out a form and if you qualify, then you
are approved for food stamps. Then over a period of time, you
either re-qualify, or run out, in some way, of your allotment,
or perhaps not, much like Medicaid, which I do have experience
with in the past, as my son maxed his $1,000,000 insurance
policy before he died.
What I want to use this example for
is to show differences between FLOW and BS.
The BS system is familiar as its in
place, IMHO, ,and is now called SNAP: Supplemental Nutritional
Assistance Program. With the substitution of Credits for
Program, you get SNAC, which I like more<G> and describes what
it really is to me.
The FLOW system is probably not
intuitive, as we see SNAP recipients growing, but probably not
receiving individual scaffolding, which would take time, but
my sense is that we could get volunteers, or pay part time
older US Citizens to work in a scaffolded approach.
Most likely, individuals have
similar problems and while it's important to legislate those
with mass causes, to me, the idea would be to get people back
into the system as quickly as possible. There is an
interesting corollary, or so it seems to me that around the
same number of people receive SNAP as are without health
insurance, albeit not the same people in all cases, but do we
have the tools with which to analyze these data points?
I won't go fully into this now, I
think you get my point.
The other point I want to make is
really going to be a touchy one and that is the whole
relationship to FREEDOM in FLOW.
I have reserved another TPOV for
this more in-depth, but to begin to sow seed, I think that
because we don't want to impinge on the freedom of people,
that is find out how they are and can live their lives--for
instance, their fitness level, as
job fit
ideas, or
fitness and consequences--we
leave them fend for themselves, as noted for the animals in
the quote above. Yet, people may not be equipped to be
hunter-gatherers anymore, and therefore we don't need to
either leave them alone (respecting their right to be free and
own their problems, even as they didn't win
nature's or nurture's lottery), or keep
pretending they can figure it out on their own, again
respecting their "freedom?"
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