Working in the newsroom of a daily paper, I never found out how the random anonymous calls from the “public” were divvied out to the reporters. I imagine the switchboard simply routed them to the first open line. Here’s why: when folks are caught up in an injustice, their stories loom large for them. But for jaded reporters it’s all just the “same old same-old.” The “tips” (as the public likes to think them) are almost always unusable, because they either involve the Public Service and “no comment,” or they involve some libelous accusation that no sluggish reporter can bother to verify. So, with a random call, the reporter’s primary task is simply delivering a polite “get lost,” without annoying a potential subscriber.

So, I’m sitting at my desk one day, when one of those calls comes in. I happen to have a little time to spare, so I show some sympathy for a helpless situation: Female, young, offended and maybe desperate, because “the social workers want to take my kids away.”
Okay… Two kids, both under school age. Why do they want to seize them? “Just because my house is dirty.” Pause. That house must be dangerously dirty, for overworked case workers to grind out all the paperwork needed to put the kids in foster-care. What’s your name and phone number? No; she’s too scare to give me her contact information. She’ll call me back, after I’ve had a chance to “investigate.” She may be on welfare and worried about her cheque.

Guessing she’ll never call back, I still take out five minutes for a quick call to the local Child and Family Services, so I can be told what I already know: privacy statutes mean they can’t discuss any cases, especially cases involving minors. There’s a little fatalism in the case-worker’s voice, like maybe she’s already been threatened by her client with “going to the press.” Sigh. Thanks and goodbye. As I expected, the young mom never called back, and until now, I never gave another thought to the grim dislocation, awaiting her kids in foster care. Perhaps not what a grandmother would have wanted for her grandchildren.
Now, assume that the young mother’s house was dangerously dirty, and that’s the only issue. So what is the reasonable way of handling this problem? Say you were a small-town mayor, fifty years ago, what would you do? You might recruit Ma Ingalls to clean the house, out of the goodness of her heart, and teach the young lady some housekeeping. What if the house is dangerously dirty? You’d dip into petty cash, hire Miracle Maids to clean it, leave the receipt in the cash box, and then recruit Ma Ingalls to mentor her. If town council questioned the expense, you’d explain that you saved the kids the life-long trauma of yanking them from mom, and you avoided the ten-thousand-times greater expense of putting them into foster-care.
So why can’t the Homogenous Universal and Managerial Administration be reasonable? If a case-worker tried to hire Miracle Maid to clean that house, her supervisor would panic at the possible headline: “Welfare Mom Getting Maid Service.” Then thousands of welfare moms all over town would rise up, demanding equality of maid service. This is what happens, given the Homogenous in the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration.
The small-town mayor’s solution arises from discernment of a particular situation. He can bring in Miracle Maids without implying that the young mother has a universal right to get her house cleaned. She receives a singular act of charity, for which she should be grateful.
The HUMA’s solution is the product of general regulation. The bureaucracy can’t hire Miracle Maids, without asserting that the mom has “a right to maid service,” a right therefore held by all single moms with dirty houses. This would fertilize the crop of dirty houses. The HUMA cannot do the reasonable and economical thing. It must incur emotional and economic costs all out of proportion to the problem, hobbled by universality.
As an over-arching administrative culture, HUMA gets even worse. We can document parental competence, and foster mothers have it, since they’re publicly certified. We can document parental incompetence, and a dangerously dirty house ticks that check box. Objectively, foster mom is more competent than natural mom. However, the documentation ignores the inefficiently “particular” fact that no-one can really replace the kids’ incompetent mom, loving them. Mom’s smells and noises go back to the womb, and represent safety and security. For their emotional health and long-term productivity, children can do better with their own incompetent mom, than a competent stranger. We all know this, because we recognize something called “attachment disorder,” when kids become incapable of bonding with anyone, like Velcro yanked one-too-many times. But social workers can’t know that.
Attachment disorders are long-term outcomes. If I’m the social worker, and these kids end up in the hospital with an infection, my butt’s in a sling. I’ve left them in an “environment” documented as unsafe. So I pull them further into “the system,” graduating them from welfare mom’s dependents to foster-care.
In providing Universal support, the HUMA inevitably asserts that people have a “right” to an unearned livelihood. So they have no need for gratitude and no reason to get off the dole. The cost to them however is everything. They cease to be their own. They become “files.” The safest adult in any child’s life is her bio-dad – safer than mommy, while the most dangerous is mommy’s new boyfriend. But regulations are not permitted to discern between a dad and a boyfriend, or between mom and foster mom. So their kids cease to be their own.
Family breakdown is the cause at the center of virtually every social disorder, from child poverty to poor school performance to chronic unemployment to domestic abuse. The public “social safety net” was originally designed to catch people “falling through the cracks” – people with no families to catch them. But now the welfare cheque subsidizes isolation.
There are grassroots responses, trying to provide ersatz family. The NeighborLink movement organizes active retirees to provide home-handyman services – primarily to single moms. Community Kitchens enlist sympathetic matrons to teach bargain shopping and cooking from scratch, dramatically cutting their fast food budget. The real need, however, is helping the kids with their homework, and that’s so time-intensive, it’s hard to see how a drop-in neighbor can substitute for a live-in family member. Not to mention, under the Net, any willing neighbors now require police checks.